Archive of Our Own

Why the hell did it have to be the sewers?

It’s a genuine question, because Ed is unsettlingly hazy on the details of how he got down here.  He’s unsettlingly hazy on… a lot of things, actually.

He is, however, polished fancy dinnerware crystal fucking clear on the fact that he wants to get out.  He’s so clear on that one that birds would bash into him and then lie on the ground dazed for a couple of seconds, the duration of which time Al would spend panicking and tentatively reaching out towards them only to change his mind.

Which… Al isn’t here.  Ed feels like Al should be here, but also like he shouldn’t be here, which he shoves into the unsettlingly hazy compartment and tries to lock up while he deals with the rest of this.  One thing at a goddamn time.

He thinks he remembers coming down here, but in the way you remember a discomfiting dream for the first five minutes, thinking it’ll haunt you all day only for it to slither out of your subconscious as soon as you focus on brushing your teeth.  He thinks he remembers a rusty ladder underneath a manhole cover, and a long, obnoxiously pungent stroll in the dark.  There was a broken lantern next to him when he woke up a minute ago—it had some sick decorative skulls on the top, so that sounds about right.

He’s relatively confident that he was sent down here to deal with someone who was holed up behind the giant iron door he woke up in sight of—or maybe he already did?  Unlikely, though: he can’t imagine he would have wound up next to the lantern like that by chance, and if he’d been tracking the country’s millionth nefarious alchemist, it almost certainly would have ended in a fight that would have broken the lantern inside instead.

He does know that it was an alchemist, though, on account of the fact that dodging the spikes that jutted suddenly out of the wall and stumbling onto a concealed transmutation circle painted in black on the walkway was what launched him into this state of unsettling haziness in the first place.  That much he remembers.

And he remembers turning around and starting to walk away.

A part of him already regrets that he didn’t get up, brush himself off, bust through that door, and promptly beat the shit out of the nefariously responsible party, but bailing just this once seemed like the safer call for reasons that he hasn’t even entirely pinned down yet.  Maybe it’s partly because Al’s not here, but it just feels like he has too much to lose, and the risk isn’t worth it.

He doesn’t know what he has to lose, and a little ball of fire in the center of his chest has started burning furiously in resentment of the decision, but it doesn’t seem as simple as retreat or revenge.

There’s something wrong.

There’s something very wrong.

When nothing had emerged from the door and sunk its teeth into his throat, he’d felt around in his pockets—his boring pockets, because he’s wearing black jeans and a loose black T-shirt, which doesn’t make much sense either—until he’d turned up a pen to copy the array onto his skin for safekeeping.  It would’ve been a lot damn easier if he’d had his notebook, obviously, but with slim pickings at his left hand, he’d ended up scribbling it upside-down on his stomach.  On the side that doesn’t have a huge, gnarly mess of a scar on it, which he doesn’t remember either.

It’s okay.  It’s fine.  He’ll reverse-engineer the array later, when he’s someplace that doesn’t smell like concentrated ass, where there’s more light than the occasional flickering fluorescent castaway.  It looks like there’s a grate on the ceiling up ahead.  He’ll get the fuck out of here, and call in, and eloquently inform asshole Mustang that this bullshit would have gotten out of anyone’s hands, and then he’ll go find Al and start undoing whatever alchemical fuckery has been imposed on his defenseless brain.

The Central City infrastructure fairies dutifully provided another rusty ladder up to the metal grate, but Ed resists the urge to sigh in relief on account of the ongoing concentrated ass smell problem.  Partway up, he can hear car tires rumbling on the road overhead, but none of their shadows have passed directly over the grating, which brings Ed’s count of the lucky breaks up to two.  Maybe three if you count not getting skewered by the spike trap, but since he’s not sure what the array did yet, he’s reserving judgment on that one for a little while.  You never know when a skewering might actually be better in the long run.

The infrastructure fairies less-kindly bolted the damn grate down into its frame, but hooking his right leg around the side of the ladder and holding it tight maintains his balance enough for him to solve that problem with a quick clap and a solid shove.

And then he’s up, and out, and passersby are staring at him and shepherding their children away a little bit, and the sun’s too bright, and the cars are driving too fast, and all of that’s about as it should be.

Right?

He kicks the grate back into place and fixes the bolts, more because he doesn’t want anything else following him out of that place than because he’s some model citizen.

He spots a phone booth down the street—currently occupied by a woman in a dark green coat, so he takes his time walking towards it.  His head feels funny anyway.  Maybe it was the concentrated ass, or the sudden transition from the darkness to the overwhelming sunlight, but everything feels a little unsteady in a way he’s familiar with.  Concussion o’clock, probably.  Fuck and double fuck.

He has to dedicate more brainpower than he’d like to walking in a straight line instead of tipping over on the sidewalk and toppling into the gutter, but he tries to take stock of what the hell has happened inside his spinning skull.  His stomach has helpfully started lurching, jumping, and twisting itself into sailing knots with every step.

Assessing himself is something concrete to go on, though.  He doesn’t know where Al is.  He doesn’t know why he’s dressed like this.  He doesn’t remember the alchemist’s name, or the specific reason why they merited a visit from the resident one-man scare-’em-straight squad.  He suspects that it might have something to do with the fucker scrambling people’s brains at the drop of a hat, but you have to keep an eye on your own confirmation bias at times like these.

Al’s probably back at the barracks.  Was he so mad at Ed that he didn’t want to come?  Ed feels like he would remember that—it sits like a lump of cold lead in his guts when Al’s mad at him.  Maybe Al wanted to do more research on the alchemist before they blundered down there, and Ed jumped the gun.  It’s not like he could have overslept.

Is it laundry day?  Is this a stealth mission?  Did he lose a bet?  He found out while he was drawing the array that he is wearing a cool belt, but overall he looks like a stagehand in a theater or something, not the alchemist who’s going to whup somebody’s ass so hard that they’ll rue the day they ever took up nefariousness.  And the short sleeves are… inconvenient.  People are staring at his automail, and he doesn’t blame them, given how the sunlight’s skimming on it.

Does it feel a little lighter, though, or is that just the dizziness getting the best of him?  The woman leaves the phone booth when he’s about fifteen steps away, so he closes the distance and puts his left hand on the door for leverage before he risks looking down.

His head wheels wildly, and his vision swims—both of which he’d expected.

The grooves on the back of his forearm have sharper corners than they used to—which he hadn’t expected.  At all.

This can’t be a new model, either—can’t be new enough to have gotten knocked out of his short-term memory when he flung himself into that array like a goddamn amateur, at any rate.  There are too many nicks and scrapes on the metal for that.  The joints move too cleanly.  He’s been wearing this for a while.

He takes a few deep breaths and eases open the door of the phone booth.  He can’t do anything about that yet.  The best solution available to him at this point is to stick to his original plan.

He fishes in his uncool pockets until he turns up some change.  He thumbs it in and dials and resists the urge to close his eyes as the line rings.  The switchboard wants his ID number, of course.  The world starts wavering around the edges of the phone bank as he waits again, which he knows damn well is a bad sign.  He’s running out of time.

“Ross,” a familiar voice says.

Ed blinks.  The scenery outside the windows doesn’t stop shimmering, but it was worth a shot.  “I’m—hi.  Sorry.  I need Mustang.”

“Hey, Ed!” Maria Ross says brightly.  “No problem.  Let me patch you through to his office.”

Ed opens his mouth to say that that’s the number that he called, but the static cuts him off before he can articulate it anyway.

This time, the line doesn’t even finish ringing once before it catches.

“Mustang.”

Ed sets his jaw and clenches his right hand around the corner of the phone bank.  His knee feels weak, and his vision has started going dark around the edges.  “Colonel, it’s me.  Something went sideways.  I’m—I came up somewhere near…” He has to turn painstakingly slowly to prevent his brain from tilting like the deck of a ship and sloshing him overboard.  He squints through the glass.  His heartbeat is way too fucking fast.  “Some branch of the Amestrian National Bank.  And a… there’s a restaurant.”

The silence on the other end of the line makes his spine tighten, and his guts roil a little harder.  Fucking Mustang.  It’s not like he expected some effusion of promises to send someone out right away, but this really isn’t the time to give him shit for bungling what should have been an ordinary assignment, and—

“Ed,” Mustang says, in the weirdest, quietest voice Ed thinks he’s ever heard out of the bastard’s mouth, “what happened?”

“I’ll put it in the damn report, okay?” Ed says, biting the words out one at a time so that bile won’t come up with them.  “Get somebody out here quick.  I’ve got—I’ve probably got about a minute before I pass out.  There’s grass over there.  I’m gonna go lie down.”

The sharpness of Mustang’s intake of breath makes the whole unsettling haziness somehow even worse.

“Shit,” Mustang says, so softly Ed’s tormented, overtaxed brain might well have made it up.  Everything sure is swirly.  The black and yellow stars have started popping in front of his eyes, and the darkness at the sides cinches in.  He’s hosed.  “Ed—be careful, please, just—take it slow.  I—shit.  Ed, I l—”

The wall of the phone booth rushes upward and crashes into the side of his face, and everything goes dim before it disappears.

The hoarse hum of a car engine draws him slowly upward out of sleep.

No, not sleep.  Unconsciousness.  Important distinction.

His head rests on something warm and slightly yielding—someone’s lap?  Not Al’s, for damn sure, but there’s a hand laid against the top of his head, stroking very gently, which—if it isn’t Al’s, then—

“I can’t find an injury,” Mustang’s voice says from right the fuck above him.  “But he said ‘Colonel’ on the phone.  It could—”

Ed winches his eyes open even though the light immediately makes him ferociously nauseous.  Mustang doesn’t look so hoity-toity from this angle, at least.  The undersides of people’s chins defy dignity.  “Stop talkin’ about me.  What the hell are you doing?”

Mustang’s hand stills, and in the first instant that he looks down—

Everything’s still fuzzy.  Ed blinks twice, and by then Mustang just looks like he wishes this whole excursion was over.

He doesn’t know the half of it.

“What we’re doing is taking you to the hospital,” Mustang says, very evenly.  “We’re nearly there.  How do you feel?”

“Like shit,” Ed says, closing his eyes again.  Mustang’s useless and a bastard, but the car doesn’t reek oppressively of cigarette smoke, so Hawkeye must be driving.  Even Mustang can’t mess up dropping him off at the hospital under Hawkeye’s supervision.  “Show you the array later.  Don’t wanna throw up in your car.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Mustang says.

With the way today’s been going, it absolutely figures that that’s the last crap Ed hears before the unconsciousness swallows him again.

The lights are even worse the second time—fucking hospital rooms with their white walls and their white lightbulbs pointed directly at your face, and all the talking and the noise—

Ed holds his left hand over his eyes and tries to get his right elbow underneath him enough to sit up.  Even just a bleary sliver of the view was enough to identify the place, and he knows what comes next: the debrief to the nurse, the debrief to the doctor, nobody believing him, making them call Mustang, making Mustang call Al, making Mustang make the doctors cut him loose so he can hole up in his room with a pillow over his head until the worst of it passes.  Al will help him with the array.  Al’s brilliant at working backwards with stuff like that.  They can catalogue all of the effects, make a timeline, start matching things up to the sigils—

A very gentle hand flattens itself on his left shoulder-blade to help him sit up.

He startles away from it and whips his hand down to clear his field of vision in the same movement.  No damn heartbeats to waste if there’s someone—

It’s Mustang again.

It’s Mustang, sitting in one of the incredibly uncomfortable blocky armchairs with the gray ass-numbing cushions, with a folder open on his lap and his hand still extended, hovering in the air.  Hesitating.

Mustang looks as shocked as Ed is, in the very first second—and then suspicious, in the next one.  And then guarded.

Sounds about right.  The guy can’t even hold onto an honest emotion for the full length of a breath.

Mustang closes the file, sets it aside, slings himself up out of the chair, and strides over to the door to stick his head out into the hallway.  Ed stares at his back.  What the hell is he even doing here?  Where’s Al?

Mustang calls out to someone, and in seconds a nurse comes bustling back in with him.  Ed presses himself back against the pillow, not that that’s going to stop her from shining the horrible penlight in his eyes and asking him all the stupid questions and prodding his head and invading his space.

Despite having done his due diligence or whatever, Mustang keeps loitering in the room, staying close behind the nurse.  There must be a mountain of paperwork on his desk.  Or maybe he thinks Ed fouled the mission up on purpose, and he wants the intel now so that he can start spinning the angle for Ed’s lousy report.

The nurse pulls up a chair and pulls out the penlight.  Ed grits his teeth.  His head’s already pounding, and his stomach feels like all the normal acid’s gone volcanic.

“Sorry about this,” the nurse says, at least, as she shines the horrible light right into his miserable eyeballs, which instantly redoubles their misery.  “Can you tell me your name?”

“Edward Elric,” he says.  Gritting his teeth makes his head hurt worse, so he can’t even have that.  What a goddamn nightmare.

“How old are you?” she asks, flicking the light again, and it takes about everything he’s got left to resist the urge to duck away from it.

His mouth opens.  “Twenty-four,” he says.

And—

Wait.

But—

That’s… true.  He knows that’s true.  Only—

“What year is it?” she asks.

“1914,” he says.

She lowers the penlight.

Ed can feel Mustang’s eyes on him like two gun barrels, and the bastard doesn’t even know how to miss.

Ed swallows, which hurts slightly less than some of the other shit.

“That—” He tries to clear his throat.  “That doesn’t… add up.  But it’s—true.  Isn’t it?”

The nurse looks at Mustang, so Ed gives in and looks over at him, too.

He’s looking back.  The eyes are all Ed gets to go on—his face is so blank that you could stretch it over a frame and use it as a canvas.

Ed swallows again.  “Where’s Al?”

“He’s in Xing,” Mustang says—so softly that it sounds like he’s trying to convince a feral animal to eat out of his hand.

Ed glances at the nurse, but she’s just holding the penlight in both hands and looking between him and Mustang.

“Okay,” Ed says, slowly.  “What’s he doing there?”

“He’s studying alkahestry,” Mustang says.  He blinks so deliberately that it looks like he planned it out in advance.  “He’s doing very well, except for missing you.  He writes to you all the time.”

Ed listens to his breath—entering his lungs, exiting them, returning and receding.

This is fine.  This is—good, actually, if Al’s doing well, does that mean—

“He’s—back?” Ed says, cautiously, in case he misread, and Al’s just running around as seven feet of steel knocking priceless Xingese statuary over with his forearm spikes and loving every minute of it.  “He’s—whole.  Or—”

The way Mustang smiles makes something in him heat like glass in a sunbeam.

And it makes his guts drop.

What the fuck is Mustang doing looking at him like—that?  It’s great that the bastard’s so damn happy to talk about Al, because everyone should be damn happy to talk about Al, but this is—

“Fit as a fiddle and much more popular,” Mustang says, still so warmly that Ed wants to check for someone waiting around the corner with a camera.

Ed opens his mouth and shuts it again.  Mustang didn’t react to the first thing he said—so if this isn’t some implausibly elaborate practical joke, then he is twenty-four.  That feels right, in a fundamental way he can’t get his hands around.  He feels… settled… in a way that he didn’t in any of the memories that are coming up clear.  The fear is gone.  The terror in the face of the passage of time has dwindled to something manageable.  Tomorrow doesn’t feel like a threat.

And if Al is—

But he’s—

Not.

He curls his automail hand into a fist very slowly on top of the sheet while he turns that over for a second.  It doesn’t matter what happened—what was done.  All that matters is that Al has his body back, and he’s healthy and happy and terrorizing another nation altogether, which has the side benefit that he doesn’t have to worry about living under Mustang’s impending tyranny.

Apparently Ed does.

Apparently Ed… chose to.  There’s still a silver watch in his pocket.  He doesn’t know for sure if it’s the same one, because he hasn’t taken it out, but he couldn’t mistake the weight of it in a thousand years, let alone nine that were stolen out of his fucking brain.

Which—

“Hang on,” he says.  He digs his pen back out and tries for a smile at the nurse, but his head still feels like a merry-go-round.  “Could I have some paper, please?”

She glances at Mustang for permission, which is extremely annoying, but at least she darts out at his nod.

No time like the present for Ed to hike his shirt up and show Mustang his handiwork.  “Okay, it’s a little distorted, because it was dark down there, and I already kinda felt like I’d been hit in the head with a crowbar—”

Mustang hasn’t moved.

Ed is showing him the cause of this whole problem, and the purported premiere problem-solver of the whole stupid nation-state is just standing there, looking at him.

Ed rolls his shirt back down, setting his jaw—which also aggravates the headache—and looking back.  “What?”

Mustang moves this time—it looks almost like a shiver, and almost like he’s shaking himself.  He takes a breath, holds it, and lets it out very slowly.  The tip of his tongue slides over his upper lip.

“Nothing,” he says, which is bullshit, and they both know it.  “A lot has changed since 1914.”

“No shit,” Ed says, eyeing Mustang’s shoulder bars.  “Congratulations, by the way, I guess.”

Mustang takes an even deeper breath this time.  No reaction to the sarcastic tone, except maybe the faintest ripple of something indistinguishable across his face.  He smiles, very thinly.  “You had quite a hand in it.”

The face Ed’s making must be funny as hell, because Mustang almost smiles for real.

Before Mustang’s deep-breathing exercises can spiral any further, the nurse returns with paper, and Ed flips the bottom hem of his shirt back up and starts copying the array before he forgets what any of the smudgy details are meant to mean.  The nurse starts talking through some forms with Mustang, quietly enough that Ed can just tune her out and focus on the circle.

This will be tougher to crack without Al’s help—without anyone’s help—but he’ll figure it out.  Those memories are his.  He earned them—made them.  He wants them back.

Mustang and the nurse are still nattering when he finishes copying over all the lines.  He looks down at his right hand again.  Underneath the insistent throb of the headache at the base of his skull and all the way around both eye sockets, he can just feel a buzz of pain in the muscles around his shoulder.  It must be a lighter alloy, which has clearly helped—nine more years of this shit would have bent him over to one side if it hadn’t.  It still hurts, though.  It hurts like the threat of a thunderstorm, and he can feel it prickling up and down in between the curve of the metal and his spine.  It’s going to kick his ass later, like it always does.

And he’s going to get back up again, like he always does.

Al’s okay.  That’s the only thing that matters.  Al’s better than okay—Al’s perfect.  He’s got to be.  The Ed in the past—whatever part of the past it was—wouldn’t have settled for anything less.  No Ed in any conceivable universe ever would.

The nurse secures one of the forms on her clipboard, brings it over, and extends it to Ed.  He’s pretty damn familiar with all of the papers they flap in your face around here—this one says Discharge at the top, though, which is somewhat surprising when he only just got here.

He signs it anyway, of course.  Better to be miserable and achy and concussed at in a real bed than to do it here.

But that does foreground another problem.  As soon as the nurse pops back out into the hallway, he turns to Mustang.

“That was fast,” he says.

Mustang shrugs.  It looks weird on him—foreign and informal.  He steps around the foot of the bed to collect his file again, adding it to the top of a stack that he’d set on the next bed over.  He lays the new forms the nurse gave him on top of the whole pile.  “There isn’t much they can do except monitor you.  Might as well be monitored somewhere more comfortable and less expensive.”

There it is.  Figures.  Mustang’s probably saving up for another employee salary so that he won’t have to carry paperwork around with him anymore.  Equal odds whether he wants to hire someone to actually do it for him, or just to carry it and listen to him whine.

“Right,” Ed says, slowly.  He scoots an inch or so towards the edge of the bed and doesn’t feel overly inclined to vomit up all of his internal organs.  Progress.  “Have I got a roommate or something?”

It can’t be Havoc, or his clothes would smell like smoke.  He and Breda would have killed each other over the last piece of pizza by now.  If he lived with Falman, the combined weight of their books would collapse the floor.  Fuery, maybe?  He and Fuery might get along.

He scoots another inch closer to the side of the mattress.  Maybe it’s somebody new—maybe he’s done the unthinkable and made some friends in the past nine years.  Maybe he’s about to get dropped off with a total stranger that he has to trust to assess the circumference of his pupils at regular intervals.

“So to speak,” Mustang says.

Ed glowers at him for a second, but sliding himself down off of the bed has to take precedence, because it requires his full attention.

Which is how Mustang sneaks up on him and gets a hand underneath his left elbow before he even realizes that the bastard has moved.

“Easy,” Mustang says in that bewilderingly unfamiliar soft voice.

Ed’s head pounds harder.  Mustang is prettier up close—pretty eyes, pretty eyelashes, pretty cheekbones, pretty mouth.  There’s silver in his hair now.  Faint streaks, but it must drive him to distraction to have to face the music about his age.

But if the vanity was the issue, he could dye it, couldn’t he?  Does he want the other generals to see that he’s older and supposedly wiser and rub it in that he’s survived this long?

He’s too gorgeous by half either way, and Ed was trying not to think about it, but now he’s right here and radiating body heat, and his grip on Ed’s elbow is unexpectedly gentle, but strong enough that Ed knows he could lean on it, and—

And that’s dangerous.  Always has been.  A couple of years won’t have changed that.

Ed tugs his arm opposite the curl of Mustang’s fingers, not quite daring to pull the way he wants to with his balance like it is.

Mustang lets go—just like that.  Instantaneously.  His face closes off, and his eyes flick away, and he steps back.  He works his jaw for a fraction of a second while Ed desperately tries to figure out what the fuck just—

“Sorry,” Mustang says.  This array must have muddled up Ed’s hearing, too.

“Whatever,” Ed says.  His skin feels too tight.  His arm tingles where Mustang’s fingertips rested.  Like little burn wounds to accompany his skull’s valiant attempts at implosion.  “So who’s the poor schmuck I live with?”

Mustang’s lips part again.  He tucks all of the file folders under his left arm and pushes his right hand through his hair.

“Me,” he says.

Ed stares at him again.  “That’s not funny.”

Mustang’s voice goes into another heretofore unimaginable register: faint, almost weak, and so dry that it’s delicate.  “Not just now, it’s not.”

Ed keeps eyeing him in case he decides to throw some confetti and conclude the sick little joke.  “You—said Al writes.  Does he have a phone?  Or access to one, or something?  I want to—talk to him.”

Mustang breathes very deeply one more time and then steps back and extends his arm to gesture towards the door.  “There’s one in the imperial palace that’s internationally connected.  If we send him a telegram, he should be able to make it over there and call us shortly after we get home.”

Ed had tentatively started walking past him, but that—

“In,” Mustang says, woodenly.  “Shortly after we get in.”

Ed stays still for another second, even though the doorway’s hardly more than four more steps away.

Mustang is… trying, in some strange, backwards, alter-world kind of way, to be nice to him and give him space.  They must make better roommates than Ed ever would have dared to dream of.  Nine years of voluntarily suffering each other’s trespasses must have changed something.

Ed’s treating him like the same old Mustang.  But he’s not.

“Thanks,” Ed manages, hoping that maybe that can at least make a start on it.  “That sounds good.”

Mustang’s smile couldn’t fool a child, but the guy is having just as incomprehensible a day as Ed is, so maybe Ed can cut him some slack just this once.  “Lead the way.”

AL STOP

ALCHEMICAL ACCIDENT STOP.  PHYSICALLY OK BUT MEMORIES ARE NOT STOP.  AS WEIRD AS IT SOUNDS TRUST ME STOP.  PLEASE CALL WHEN YOU CAN STOP.  LOVE ED STOP.

“Huh,” Ed says, partly just because the silence in the car has started to feel sticky and isolating.

“‘Huh’ what?” Mustang asks.

Ed watches carefully, but he doesn’t glance over.  It could be that he’s avoiding looking at Ed because this whole situation is… whatever the fuck it is, but Ed finds the alternative explanation more appealing:

“You’ve gotten better at driving.”

The corner of Mustang’s mouth turns up.  Sunset lighting on his skin softens the lines around his eyes, and the circles underneath them.

“I’m focusing,” he says.  “It has been nine years.”

“Apparently you spent eight of them practicing driving instead of working,” Ed says.  “Can you park now?”

“Ask me in another nine years,” Mustang says.

Thinking about what to say to him is a whole hell of a lot better than thinking about why Ed lives in his house.  It can’t even be a setup.  Hawkeye would never let Mustang get away with it when she knows Ed was hospitalized for the brain-mashing thing this afternoon.

Besides, Mustang is being strangely… cooperative.  Laid-back.  Ed almost wants to say cool, but that isn’t the right word for it.  Reserved, possibly.  His eyes have stayed impossibly dark and sharp, so Ed knows that he spent a lot of the time calculating while they made the trip to the telegram office and then to pick up some Cretan takeout that smells divine on their way back to whatever suburb Mustang’s house lurks in.  Ed remembers the Cretan place.  It went onto Al’s notebook list.  He hopes they went back there, and Al got to try it.

He hopes Al gets the message.  He hopes it’s not too late at night in Xing.  He hopes that Al can shake some sense into him, or out of this, or something.

Mustang has kept a careful, consistent little distance in between them everywhere they’ve gone, and he’s let all of the jibes and digs roll off of him like a songbird preening under a light rain.  He’s been uncannily quiet and unusually calm.

Ed keeps trying to steer his brain away from wondering what the Bastard Lair looks like.  He’s going to find out in a matter of minutes, and his memories must be locked up somewhere—engraved on some surface that this whole mess threw a shroud over.  He already knows what it looks like.  He just can’t access that information because of the fuckoff diabolical alchemist who decided that trespassers who are willing to brave the sewers simply haven’t been through enough.

Right?

“If you keep driving like you want to see tomorrow,” Ed says, “we might just live nine more years.”

“We might just,” Mustang says, so softly that Ed eyes him again, but he isn’t smiling anymore.

Mustang’s kitchen is boring, which makes it safe.  Ed’s had enough of not-boring shit for one day.  He’d like to be bored out of his mind for the foreseeable future before he leaps back into the chaos again.

Shit.  He really is twenty-four, isn’t he?  It’s all downhill from here.

The food’s as good as he remembered—access-granted-remembered—but he keeps staring at a little potholder hanging on a hook over the stove.  It’s white fabric with a waffled texture, with a red poppy embroidered in the center.  A few smudges of soot decorate the edges.  It doesn’t look familiar, but it also doesn’t look like the sort of thing that Brigadier General Procrastinator Asshole should have in his bizarrely normal house.

It’s not as big as Pinako’s place, of course—or as big as theirs used to be.  Ed doesn’t want to go any further than the kitchen just now.  He lives here.  There will be traces of him scattered through it—pieces of himself that he doesn’t even know yet, but which might be unequivocally true at the same time that they’re cut away from him by time that he can’t recognize.

At least his head feels like it’s screwed on firmly, whether or not any of what’s in it makes sense.  At least it’s no longer actively trying to burst like an overfilled balloon full of mushy gray matter and maybe some glitter.  At least Mustang is pretending so hard that this is normal that Ed can almost make himself believe it.

He’s torn between wanting to stay here, in the unremembered safety of the kitchen, for the rest of time and racing around the remainder of the house flinging anything that might be his out into the open in case it jogs something.  

This is alchemy—quality alchemy.  It isn’t just going to crack down the middle and melt away the moment he applies some pressure.  He’s going to have to be smarter than that.  He’s going to have to work harder.

Fortunately, both those things are something of a specialty.

Mustang has been moving his food around more than he’s been eating.  It looks like abstract art, or possibly vomit.  It’s a fine line.  Presumably that’s why they call it “fine art”.

Ed is still half ruminating and half mopping up sauce when Mustang stands up to go dump the magnum opus into the garbage and his plate into the sink.

“Have as much as you like,” he says, and he’s ghosted out into the hall before Ed can decouple his brain from alchemical mechanisms of erasure long enough to reply.

Mustang looked tired in a new way this time—drained dry, used up, ground down.  His footsteps trail up the staircase and then around whatever rooms occupy the second floor.  They pause several times.  A door closes, quietly, and then the footsteps come back down.  They proceed through the hall again, never veering particularly close to the kitchen, and head on into the room at the end that Ed glimpsed from the entryway.  It’s got a nice sofa and two nice armchairs set in front of a nice fireplace.  Lots of books.  Looked cozy in a way that made Ed’s heart try to turn itself inside-out.  Looked like a place he’d want to live, and he does, but he doesn’t.

He finds himself hoping that it helps Mustang—being in that room.  Being surrounded by all those nice things, while a distinctly not-nice thing continues to hang around his kitchen sucking up sauce with all the grace and tact and pleasantness of an overgrown mosquito.

Maybe Ed should brave the upstairs.  He kind of has to pee, and he didn’t see a bathroom down here, and if he lives in this place, he must have some better clothes stashed around here somewhere.  If nothing else, maybe he can hole up in his bedroom and pull the blanket over his head and try to forget how much he doesn’t remember.

The phone on the long, narrow table in the foyer trills shrilly in the silence.

Ed bolts out of his seat, slamming his right knee against the underside of the table en route, and dives through the doorway to it.  He snatches it up before it’s finished shivering on the hook, smacking it against his ear hard enough that he probably just crowned all of the other shit with a nice, purple bruise.  “Hello?”

“Hi, Brother!” Al says.

There’s a slight delay, and his voice is quiet and distant from the sheer length of the phone line.

But it’s clear—clear as day, clear as a stark blue sky over the hills at home in the dead heat of summer, when the whole world settles underneath the cloudless expanse and slowly exhales.  Not even a trace of tinniness.  Flesh and blood and beaming grin.

Ed presses his left hand over his mouth and tries to grip his own jaw hard enough to hold himself together.

“Brother?” Al says.  “Are you there?”

“Yeah,” Ed chokes out.  Mustang has made himself scarce, to his credit, or possibly to his cowardice.  Ed doesn’t care.  At this particular moment, it seems better that he can speak freely.  “Sorry.  Just—give me a minute.  This is… this is the first…”

“Take your time,” Al says, very softly.  “You want me to talk about something?  I can just talk.”

Ed makes a fierce effort at choking down the knot in his throat.  “Sure.  Just—whatever.  How happy you are.  How good things are.”

“Things are amazing!” Al says, and the warmth of his voice down the line seeps in through Ed’s fucking skin, and… and he can do this.  He can.  He can do anything as long as Al is out there, somewhere, safe and happy and breathing and hopeful and sounding like that.  “I keep telling you that you should come visit, but you’re always so busy.  I guess I’m pretty busy, too.  Gosh, let me see if I can… You don’t remember any of it?”

“The array was some pretty slick work,” Ed gets out.  His voice wobbles a little, but it doesn’t crack yet.  He holds onto the phone a little tighter just in case, wishing it was Al’s hand, his shoulder, his wrist, his sleeve.  Wishing he could press his ear to Al’s chest and hear a heartbeat and let all of this just… fade.  “Ripped practically everything out at the roots.”

“That’s fine,” Al says, so it has to be.  Of course it is.  It’s going to work out.  Al said so.  “It means I get to brag all over again from the start.  Alkahestry is so much more complicated than we realized, but it’s been fantastic trying to pick it up.  It’s like a puzzle with a million layers.”

Ed closes his eyes and listens hard.  “If anybody could solve that, it’s you.”

Imagining him is—

Beautiful, terrible, wonderful.  Like being raked across perfumed coals.  He’s not here, Ed can’t touch him, but he must be smiling like a whole sky full of constellations, and Ed can still remember exactly the way his eyes crinkle at the corners, exactly the way he pushes his bangs back out of his face with his hand when he’s distracted and trying to think.

At least there’s one upside to him being a bazillion miles away when Ed needs to wrap both arms around him and squeeze the air out of his perfect lungs: he’s probably so fucking tall now that Ed would be looking up his nose all the goddamn time.  Silver lining, arguably.

Ed would rather have the rain.

Al tells him about Xing for what feels like forever, and also not nearly long enough.

Then he sighs contentedly, pauses less contentedly, and says, slowly, “Brother, are you ready now?”

“I have no idea,” Ed says.

Al makes a quiet little humming noise of agreement that soothes some of the terrible fluttering in Ed’s chest.  “That’s okay.  Where do you want to start?”

Ed does know that.

“Right,” he says, carefully.  He lowers his voice.  “I… dunno if I can trust anybody else to tell me the whole truth about this, but it’s obviously pretty relevant, so…”  He cups his hands around the mouthpiece of the phone even though the door to the room at the end of the hall is firmly shut, and he hasn’t seen obnoxiously appealing hide or slightly silvered hair of the culprit since he got on the line.  “Why am I living with Mustang?”

There is a very, very long pause.

Static shivers down the line as Al blows out a breath and then draws in a new one to fortify himself with.  Ed is torn between heart-stopping terror and heart-melting nostalgia.  This is going to get really messy really fast if his heart tries to stop and to melt at the same time.

“For one thing,” Al says, delicately, “he hasn’t been ‘Mustang’ in a long time.  He’s just Roy.”

Another breath.  This must be bad.  Maybe Ed lost a big bet—much bigger than the one that landed him in the boring clothes.  Maybe he fucked something up, and he owes the military a ton of money, so it’s coming out of his wages, and he can’t afford to pay rent anywhere in the city, and Mustang took pity on him.  Maybe— 

“You’re dating,” Al says.  “You’re together.  Romantically.  And… stuff.”

Ed stares at the wallpaper, which alternates green and ivory stripes and little dividers with a pattern of ivy vines.  Then he stares at the table.  Dusty as shit.  At least Mustang clearly hasn’t conscripted him to do housework.

“What?” he says.  “No.”

Al sighs so loud that Ed could probably hear it from Xing even without the help of the phone line.  “‘What’ is fair, but—yes.  It’s true.”  He makes another soft little hum noise, of thoughtfulness this time, and Ed clings to the receiver.  It’s Al.  He’s still got Al.  The whole world can turn itself right the fuck upside down and shake until every other molecule falls to pieces, but he’s still got Al.  “If you don’t remember getting my body back, you must have lost a lot of time.  Eight years?”

Ed tries to speak, and the words cling on to the backside of his tonsils for dear life.  He clears his throat.  “Closer to nine.  Thought it was 1914.  I sort of… I kind of knew it wasn’t—I knew how old I was—but that’s the last firm thing I’ve got, so…”

“Right,” Al says, briskly, which weirdly sort of helps.  These are the facts.  This is where they’re starting from.  Where they go and how they get there is up to them.  “Brother.”

Ed likes that tone a little less.  He knows when Al is leading up to something.  “What?”

“Question,” Al says.  “Why the heck did you think you were living with Mustang?”

“How the hell should I know?” Ed says, lowering his voice even further, well aware that he probably looks like some sort of nightmare cave-dwelling creature, hunched over and hissing into the phone.  “Maybe the military put together some sort of—alchemist residential consolidation program.  Maybe they finally noticed how often alchemists go around killin’ totally normal people, so they figured if they force them to live together, at least sometimes we’ll kill each other first.  That sounds a lot more plausible than me—” Fuck.  “—than us—than… this.”

“It’s been nine years, Brother,” Al says.  “And the two of you have spent the last five of them together, working on this whole government thing.  And anyone who’s ever seen you together knows that you’ve always had… what should I say?”

“Antagonism,” Ed mutters, glancing sideways to make sure Mustang isn’t lurking close enough to hear that one.  “Mutual murderous intent.”

“Chemistry,” Al says.

“My own brother,” Ed says, switching the phone to his left hand so that he can press the heel of the right to his forehead.  Maybe the steel will help cool the flush.  “Maligning the good name of science.”

“Shut up,” Al says, cheerfully.  “If you don’t believe me—well, I can understand how you wouldn’t.  It took a while.  But I’ve got a stack of your letters back at my place, with all your lightly encoded pleas for advice on how to handle it.  Which is very funny, of course, because I wouldn’t know anything about that sort of thing, being as pure as the driven snow.”

“Sure,” Ed says, flatly.

“Hey,” Al says.  “Can you blame me?  You kind of were born yesterday right now.”

“Good point,” Ed says.  “Why don’t you go ahead and pull the other leg while you’re at it?  It’ll come off in your hand.”

Al laughs, bright and warm and genuine, and Ed feels like he might just survive this shit.  He might just have to, so that he gets a chance to hear that joy in person.

There’s a thought—he could run away to Xing.  That’s starting to sound easier than any of the alternatives, godforsaken desert notwithstanding.

“Hey,” Al says.  “You still there?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Just—thinking.”

“Be careful,” Al says.

“Shut up,” Ed says.

“No, I mean it,” Al says.  “Your head is probably pretty jumbled up after having all that alchemical energy run through and wipe most of nine years right out of it.  You should rest.  Keep your eyes closed.  Get some ice on your forehead, maybe.”

Ed taps his metal fingertips on the edge of the table, watching the way they gleam dully under the ceiling light.  “Al… What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“I just told you,” Al says.  “Rest, and keep your—”

Ed clutches the phone closer and lowers his voice.  “About Mustang, Al.”

“Roy,” Al says.

Al is probably on to something about the closing his eyes thing, since squeezing them shut reduces the pounding by a measurable margin as Ed runs his cool steel fingers over his forehead.  “Sure.  Roy.  Whatever.”

“Well,” Al says, “I think the same thing applies, actually.  Take it easy for now.  Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.  And when you’re feeling better, see about undoing that array to reverse the effects.”

Ed has to open his eyes so that he can blink at the tactful wallpaper.  “Are you sure?”

“Am I sure?” Al says.  “Good grief, Brother.  I know you can’t know what you don’t know, but—”

“The only thing riskier than mixing alchemy with your own brain once,” Ed says, “is doing it a second time, on purpose.”

“Obviously,” Al says, and Ed wishes ferociously that he was here to be punched in the arm the way that that invites.  “But it’s worth a little bit of risk.”

Ed holds his chipped, scarred metal hand up in front of the demure curls of the ivy pattern with its perfect heart-shaped leaves.  “Why?”

Al sighs softly, which shivers on the line like he’s speaking into a rainstorm.

“Because you were happy,” he says.  “Because you were so happy, Ed.  Because you could never quite believe it, but you let yourself believe in it.  Because he loves you so much that you never really had a choice.”

Ed stares at his fingertips.  No nails.  No prints.  No give—no softness.  A part of him always seized tight to the thought—naïve and reductive and fantastical as he knew it was—that things would change if he got his arm back.  That he would change.  That he would be warmer and gentler and easier to love.  That that would solve everything.  That that would unwind all the years of striving, and unwrite all the marks of hurt.

And now he’s standing in the front room of a house he’s never seen, being told by the shockingly clear, staggeringly corporeal voice of the only human being he can trust, that Mustang—Mustang, of all the people spread across the unfathomable breadth of the planet—wants him anyway.  Wants him in spite of it, through it, because of it.  Wants him as he is, not as he could be, or as he could have been.

Ed pulls the moments out and lines them up.  The way he was stroking Ed’s hair in the car until he realized that something was wrong—and drew his hand back, in that instant, and stayed outside the boundary.  The way he was waiting in the hospital room, settled down like he’d stay there the whole damn night if he had to.  How fast he moved when Ed’s balance faltered.  The way he talks, now—how comfortable he sounds, even when he’s trying to be careful.  Even when he’s trying to keep a safe distance and hold himself back.

Roy is a melodramatic fuck, but he’s not a good enough actor to pull off all of that.

Al wouldn’t mess with Ed about something like this.  Al is the only person in the world who knows the shape of the loneliness that Ed tried so damn hard never to describe.

Well—Al used to be the only one.

Ed lifts his shirt up and stares down at the array.  Intricate shit.  Complicated.

“Brother,” Al says softly.  “Take it one step at a time.  Just… talk to him a little bit.  Take it slow.  Think about the transmutation for a while.  You don’t have to realign the whole world singlehandedly tonight.”

Ed twists his shirt in his hand and nods, slowly, trusting that Al will know he’s doing it.  Maybe he’s been getting better at it in the years that vanished—taking things to heart.  Maybe all the barriers that he built for his own safety have eroded enough to be more permeable these days.  Maybe he’s learned how to let the bone-freezing terror of death and failure and insufficiency sluice through him, and how to wring himself dry again once it’s gone.

“Breathe,” Al says.  “And be honest with me.  Do you want me to come to Central?”

“What?” Ed says, even though his idiot, iron-walled heart leaps at the very thought.  “No.  Of course not.  Not that I don’t want to see you, obviously, but I’ll have that damn array sorted out before your feet even hit the sand, and then you’ll have come all this way for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” Al says, perfectly matter-of-factly.  “For everything.  For you.  Take a second and really think about it—not about what you think I might want, or what’s convenient, or what you imagine that a ‘good’ person would do.  Think about what you want, Brother.  Do you want me to come?”

Ed rubs at his forehead with the metal knuckles, which hurts enough to distract him from the last of the ache lower in his skull.  His shoulder still hurts.  Food helped a little.  Food always helps a little.  He’s tired, and still dizzy when he turns too fast, but at least he isn’t hungry anymore.

He does want to do what Al wants, and what’s convenient, and what a good person would do, but he tries to hold the prospect still and turn it over like Al asked him to.

That feels strangely satisfying in its own way—slowing down enough to analyze what he actually thinks, rather than letting his own knee-jerk reaction jerk him around.

“Thanks,” he says.  “And… nah.  It’s okay.  I think this is one I need to figure out for myself.”

“Yeah,” Al says.  “I know what you mean.  But there’s good news.”

Ed’s nose wrinkles itself up before he can stop it.  “Huh.”

“Don’t give me that face,” Al says, which turns the nose-wrinkling into a helpless grin, which was clearly the diabolical little brotherly intention all along.  “What you just said?  Nearly everything that you’ve just said, actually, and the way you’ve said it?  You’re the regular you.  Not the fifteen-year-old one.  You’re just… short a couple of memories.  Temporarily.  That’s all.”

“Hang on,” Ed says.  “Let me set this one up right—who the hell are you calling so short that he can’t even fit the last decade of his own recollections inside of his teeny-tiny head, Al?”

Al laughs merrily again—and you can hear the body in it.  You can hear his shoulders shaking and his lungs compressing and his face flushing and his breath cutting itself off.  You can hear how real it is.

“I love you, Brother,” Al says, and Ed feels warm down to the tips of his right-foot toes.  “If I don’t hear from you soon to tell me that you’ve sorted it all out, I will come to Central.  How about that?”

“That’s a pretty ineffective threat,” Ed says, “given my ulterior motive of wanting to see you anyway.”

“What can I say?” Al says.  “I’m a pretty ineffective threatener.  But you’re stuck with me.  Tough break, I guess.”

“The toughest,” Ed says.  He makes himself breathe deeply.  He knows he needs to hang up—he can’t even imagine how much this call has already cost, for one thing; and the whole point is that Al should be allowed to carry on without him, for another—but this phone feels like his only lifeline to anything familiar right now.  “Did the whole telegram thing work okay if I need to call you again?”

“Yup!” Al says, so brightly that the smile sneaks back onto Ed’s mouth and stages a hostile takeover in spite of all the rest of it.  Maybe this house just breeds coups d’état while nobody’s watching.  “They came right to my door, and going to the palace to use the phone is a great excuse to see Ling, too.”

It takes Ed several seconds to piece that together.  “Wait—he—if Ling’s at the palace—wait.  You’ve got to be kidding me.  Al—”

“Oh, dear,” Al says.  “Please keep me posted.  If you don’t find a way to reverse this thing, we’re going to have a lot of catching up to do.”

“I will,” Ed says.  He curls his hand into a fist and taps it down on the tabletop, and the metal clunks softly on the surface of the wood.  Al will probably know that he did that, too.  “To both.  Stay safe over there.  Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, and don’t say what you’re about to say.  I love you.  More than anything.”

“Right back at you,” Al says delightedly.  “Talk to you soon, okay?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  As soon as he can justify it, for one reason or another.

“Goodnight, Brother,” Al says.

“G’night, Al,” Ed says.

He forces himself to hang up the phone.

Then he forces himself to turn towards the door at the end of the hall.

He could put this off.  He could go back into the kitchen and wash all the dishes and go upstairs and change his clothes and find somewhere to sleep that Mustang wouldn’t have to displace him.  A lot of him wants to take that tack.  Procrastinate on the painful part.  Pretend it will be better in the morning, rather than every bit as bad, but with some softer lighting.

But it won’t help much.  Delaying the inevitable usually doesn’t.  With his luck, new problems will spring up overnight like poisonous mushrooms, and he’ll wind up in a field of fungi.

Besides—this isn’t Mustang’s fault.  Even if he put the mission papers in Ed’s hand, he couldn’t ever have known that they’d find themselves here.

And he must be… hurting.  Right?  If what Al said is true, if what any of Al said is true—and Al doesn’t lie about things that matter, or at least about things that matter to Ed—

It seems so impossible that it feels like floating.  Like Ed’s head is a beach ball full of helium, bobbing around the eaves.  Like the tectonic plate that hosts Amestris has tilted ninety degrees, and Ed is the only person gravity hasn’t shifted for.

Mustang can’t—love him.  That doesn’t add up.  Mustang loves himself, which is probably the only long-term and exclusive relationship he’s ever managed to maintain.

All right, that’s not fair.  He loves his team enough to die for them, which is precisely what makes all of them so willing to return the favor.  He loves alchemy, underneath all the horrible associations—Ed has caught him starting to read a report before the door is closed a dozen different times, and Ed knows what the conspiratorial little smile means.  Mustang loves discovery.  He loves winning, unless it comes at the cost of other people.  He loves provoking a reaction.  He loves being right.

At least—1914 Mustang does.

This Mustang is so much… quieter.

This Mustang acts like he’s got nothing left to prove.

And if what Al said is true, this Mustang found a whole hell of a lot of room in this ordinary house and that closely-guarded heart for Ed.

Out of a million people that he could have charmed and tricked and wheedled, he picked an uphill battle on purpose.  He picked someone who wouldn’t take an ounce of bullshit from him, even if it was wrapped up with a bow.  He picked someone who’s just as rough around the edges and spiky on the inside and unsure and unsteady and ill-adjusted and desperate and driven and scared and tired and doggedly determined as he is.  He picked the worst person he could have, and the hardest one to fool.

Ed walks down the hall, listening to his left heel clink on the floorboards.  He lays his softer hand flat against the door.

He stands still for a long second, listening to himself breathe, before he pushes the door open very slowly.  The hinges obligingly creak.  Mustang—Roy, whoever—will have plenty of time to hide anything he wants to.

Mustang doesn’t appear to be interested in much of that, though.  He sprawled loosely against one arm of the couch, his back to the fireplace, his eyes on the doorway.  He has one leg crooked on top of the cushions and the other hung over the side, heel brushing the carpet.  He’s tipping a snifter back and forth, long fingers loosely curled around the rim of it, ice clinking so softly that it almost chimes.  His cavalry skirt pools all over the velvety-looking red upholstery. 

Ed would spill coffee all over that.  He could get it out again with alchemy, but sometimes fixing it doesn’t matter.  Sometimes the spilling is the point.

Mustang just watches him, eyes too damn dark to read.  Inkwell depths—nothing extracted, nothing dragged out into letters.  He ditched his jacket.  He rolled his sleeves up.  Ed’s pulse beats in his throat.

Ed hates that he knows, somehow, that he’s the one who has to say something, but at least it doesn’t really matter what.  “You do this often?”

Mustang half-raises the glass towards him.  “Drink alone?”

Ed wants to say You’re not, but he doesn’t have much right.  He doesn’t know either of them anymore.

Mustang tries to hide a bitter half-smile behind the rim of the glass, but his hands move too languidly.  “Not much.  Not in a long time.”

Ed breathes a little deeper.  “When were you going to tell me?”

Mustang sips.  It shines on his mouth in the low yellow light.  “I knew Al would.”

Ed tries to tamp down the instinctive anger.  “That’s not an answer.”

Mustang shrugs, slow and fluid, without a trace of amusement.  “I’m not going to push you,” he says.  “It took many years and a great deal of effort to build up enough trust even to think about each other that way.”

Ed swallows the response that comes to mind, since he doesn’t think Actually, I thought you were brain-scramblingly hot when I was thirteen, which apparently was a primer for today’s brain scrambling will help overmuch.

Mustang tips his head back, and the lamplight plays on his exposed throat like fingertips across piano keys.  Cold ivory, but the music— “The rest of it… I know you.  I know what the walls are made of.  I know what they protect.  They’re not meant to be battered down or broken through.  They’re yours.  I respect you before any of the rest of it.”  He looks at Ed again, tilting the glass of gleaming amber liquid so slowly that Ed feels like his blood slows down, like the tide slows down, like the world does.  “Maybe it’s a blessing to have a second chance to make a choice.”

Ed curls the fingers of his left hand until he can feel his nails digging into his palm.  That’s real.  Whatever can be said about the rest of it.  “Who are you trying to convince?”

“That answer,” Mustang says, “you already know.”  He tips his head back again to finish what’s left in the glass.  His throat undulates as he swallows. “How’s Al?”

“He sounds good,” Ed says, searingly aware of the way he’s still standing in the doorway like he’s preparing to bolt.  Maybe he is, on some level.  Maybe there’s a point where it would be too much.  “We didn’t talk about him that much, which is sort of a crock of shit now that I think about it.”

Roy smiles at him—ninety percent warm, ten percent devastated.  It feels like being sucker-punched.

“You keep his letters in a shoebox in the bottom of the linen closet upstairs,” Roy says.  “We both pretend that I don’t know about it, because keeping all of them seems so sentimental.”

Ed’s heart beats.  He unclenches his fingers and pays attention to the way everything in him loosens a fraction as he lets out a breath.

“That’s nice of you,” he says, because it is.

This smile is forty-sixty.

And then it’s gone.

Roy swings himself up off the couch and crosses over to a cabinet.  The brandy bottle already stands on top of it, cork pushed back in with the minimal conviction of someone well aware they’re coming back.

“You want some?” Roy asks, without turning, as he pours, steadily enough, into his glass.

“Depends,” Ed says, slowly.  “What’s my tolerance like?  Used to be the only experience I had was that Pinako would let me sip a little from her stash when the automail pain was really bad.”

“I know,” Roy says.

As a kid, Ed always thought it was half absurd and half morbid when Pinako would say Feels like somebody just walked over my grave, but this one fits the bill too well to set aside as a wisp of folksy idiom.

He can’t imagine a time or a situation when he would volunteer that information to someone like Roy.  It’s not that it’s a secret, precisely, but it’s the kind of personal detail that you keep tucked away because it’s no one else’s business.  And because sharing it dredges something up.  And because someone like the Roy that Ed knew, the Roy that Ed remembers, might use it as leverage someday down the line.

But apparently he gave it away.

In the silence, Roy glances over his shoulder, and there’s a sort of casual tenderness in that gesture—in instantly recognizing the change in Ed’s demeanor and then immediately checking on him—that matches all the shit that came before.

Al’s not lying.  Ed’s in deep.

“Is it any good?” Ed asks, nodding towards the bottle in Roy’s too-fucking-elegant hands.

Roy smiles.  “I believe your previous verdict was that it ‘tastes like it would clear a drain, so it makes sense that it might eat through the worst of a shitty day, too’.”

That one feels like a strong uppercut to the side of the jaw.

In this moment, on this night, Roy Mustang knows more about him than he does.

Ed guides his wobbly legs over to one of the armchairs opposite the couch Roy was sitting on and drops his body into it.  His head whirls again, and he gets a few more popping yellow flickers, but the consciousness sticks around this time.

“Fuck it,” he says.  “Sure.  Hit me.”

Roy delivers a glass of something that smells like nightmare, fittingly enough, and offers his own out for a toast.  Ed gives him a dour look but clinks the damn glasses anyway.

“To these jobs,” Roy says, “which evidently destroy even the things I never thought that they could touch.”

“Today we learned never to underestimate shitty alchemists,” Ed says.  The combination of disappointment and relief as Roy backs away to sit on the couch again clouds his brain up brand new.  “Including ourselves.”

Roy raises his glass again, smile paper-thin.  “Well-put.”

Ed risks a sip.  It also tastes like nightmare.

He watches Roy drinking deeply for a few seconds.  Procrastination is the bastard’s game, not his.  Information is power, and right now he has nearly nothing to build on.

And hardly anything to lose.

“So,” he says, trying to make it sound off-handed.  “Second chances, huh?  You think I should start over?”

“Absolutely not,” Roy says.  He blinks—slow, measured, placid.  His whole face is perfectly composed, both in terms of its overall arrangement and its current neutrality.  Mustang aged like a masterpiece over the past ten years.  How the fuck is that fair?  “They’re yours.  You earned them.  You fought and bled for them, and they belong to you.  Even setting aside the war we won with the homunculi and all the friends you made… after that, you and Al spent a lot of time at home, and then a lot of time exploring.  You did what you set out to do.  You made it right.  You should get all of that back.”

Ed risks a second sip, not because he’s expecting it to go any better than the first one, but because he suspects that dealing with Roy will be easier with a little bit of liquor in him.  Roy’s probably a riot when you’re wasted.

“However,” Mustang says, with so much significance that Ed takes a third sip before the previous one has stopped burning in the back of his throat.  “I think there’s something to be said…” He purses his lips, looks at the ceiling, and rotates the snifter around in his hand.  Those fingers are the worst part—except for the voice, and the eyes.  Always have been.  Always in that order.  “You have a… unique… opportunity…”

“Get fucked,” Ed says, enunciating as distinctly as he’s capable of, before he sips again.

Roy splays his free hand over his eyes and laughs.  It sounds completely different from the one Ed’s used to—warm and deep and helpless, without a trace of derision.

“You’re right,” Roy says.  That’s another first, worthy of a fourth sip of the pipe-scouring dreck in Ed’s glass.

When he lowers the glass, the smile that Roy’s wearing is pure fucking torment: the fondness, and the sadness, and the fact that Ed can see either of them.  Roy used to hide, with him.  Roy used to be a book brimming with untranslatable languages.  Unreadable.  Unknowable.

“Hear me out,” Roy says.  “When was the last time that you could evaluate your own life from a place of objectivity?”

Ed grimaces at him, and it’s only a little bit because of the shitty alcohol.  “How in the hell am I supposed to be objective about myself?  That’s a contradiction in terms even if memory misplacement had anything to do with decision-making, which I think is a flawed premise anyway, and—”

The smile is getting so much worse.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ed manages.  He tries to relax his hands around the glass before the right one breaks it.  He cracked a lot of Pinako’s dishes during the first few months.  He’s damn good at repairing them afterwards, these days, but this conversation is difficult enough without throwing in some shattered glass.

It just got a touch more difficult, because Roy looks like he’s been hit.

Only for a second, though—after which his face goes utterly and completely blank.

“Forgive me,” he says smoothly.  “It’s… so many things still feel the same that I keep…” He slugs the rest of his drink so fast that Ed wants to reach out and pry the glass out of his hand, and then maybe hide the bottle.  Before he can execute either impulse, Roy sets the empty glass on the coffee table and stands up—mostly steadily.  He runs a hand idly down the front of his wrinkled shirt, which makes Ed’s mouth feel dry, which has to be a goddamn joke.  “Are you tired?”

“No,” Ed says.

Roy has already started for the door, as if Ed had just heartily agreed with him—which makes Ed’s blood boil, which makes Ed resolve never to agree with him ever again, which—

“We have a guest room,” Roy says, raising his voice just enough to compensate for the distance as he moves into the hall.  “It used to be almost exclusively for file storage, but you wanted a nice place for Al or Winry to stay when they visit.”

Bastard is trying to force Ed to follow him.

And it’s going to work.

Ed smacks his glass down on the table, stands, rolls his right shoulder in the weak hopes of reducing some fraction of the pain squirming up the side of his neck to merge with the headache, and tries to fight down the instinctive anger.

This isn’t Roy’s fault.  He’s just as lost and tangled in all this as Ed is—more, maybe, depending on how you see it.  He’s scared he’ll never get his Ed back.  Or that he will, and his Ed will have thought things through and won’t want him anymore.

It’s a stupid thing to be afraid of, but Ed can’t say that.  Ed doesn’t know Roy well enough—not like this.  Ed doesn’t know himself.

Ed follows him over to the stairs and reluctantly starts climbing up to join him.  “How is she?  Winry.”

“Radiant,” Roy says.  He opens the door to a little linen closet.  Ed glances guiltily at the bottom shelf, but he can’t see the shoebox full of letters from here.  “She keeps threatening to have a June wedding so that you’ll have to go to Rush Valley in the summer.”

Everything Roy has taken out so far is neatly folded, which probably means that letter deposits are the only reason Ed ever opens that door.  “It’d be such a shame to have to kill her at her own wedding.  Who’d she bamboozle into all this?”

“Paninya,” Roy says.  He gathers the new sheets in his arms and continues down the hall without looking directly at Ed even once.  “They’re very funny together.  And extremely overwhelming.”

Ed stands at the top of the stairs with his left hand on the banister as Roy steps into a room at the end of the hall.

Roy knows the names and the habits and the personalities of his old friends.  Roy talks about them like they’re family.  Roy…

Roy is all in on this shit, too, isn’t he?

Al was right.

Al was right.

Ed curls his fingers around the railing and makes himself breathe slowly.  That turns out to be a mistake, because releasing a slow exhale drops his shoulders, and the right one is still heavier than the left, which makes it feel only natural to turn his head.

The door to his right is open.  It leads into a nice, airy bedroom with off-white walls and off-white lampshades and a pale beige carpet and a huge bed with a beautiful mahogany headboard.

The soft-looking white sheets are thrown back on both sides, crumpled where they fell in the chaos of the morning.  Dents in both pillows.  The nightstand on the side closer to the door is a mess of dog-eared journals and lined notebook pages and a couple thicker books.  On the far side, there’s a glass of water and a silver alarm clock and a file folder and what looks quite like one of the train station store novels that people always end up reading, rather than ever choosing to.

The word objective feels very, very unkind.

A part of Ed wonders—

If he can’t just… pretend.

If he can’t just cross the carpet and crawl up into the bed and bury his face in the further pillow, right in the loving little impression where it cradles Roy’s head.  It’ll smell like him.

Would Ed recognize that?  Does his olfactory nerve remember it even if the rest of his brain doesn’t?  Is that carved in somehow?  Scent memory is deeply primal.  Maybe the array just sent most of his regular recollections into some sort of hibernation—laid an obstructive layer on top of them and hid them in the dark.  Maybe the scent of Roy’s skin would awaken enough of him that everything would come flooding back.

Is that what he wants?

This is someone else’s life.  Al and Roy are both convinced, for some reason, that he’s still him, but that can’t be right.  He hasn’t actually done any of the things that shaped that person.  He hasn’t personally weathered any of the storms that that Ed survived.

All he has—all he is—is a jumble of blurry bits and pieces.  All that’s left to him is this quiet certainty that everything between the past and now is missing, like the buzz of static stranded between two frequencies.  His remaining instincts come from a convoluted chasm of negative space.

He can’t know what he wants when he doesn’t know who he is.

Maybe that’s not entirely true.  Maybe it’s not quite that simple—or maybe it’s much simpler.

Maybe he wants what he’s always wanted.

He wants to be forgiven.

He wants to be loved.

He wants to belong.

The person that purportedly he was opened a back door to a Roy Mustang that he’d never seen, in the time before.  That Ed must have worked some kind of miracle.  He found someone underneath the endless layers of shells and masks and shields.  He found someone who gave him all of those things, and asked only for the equivalent exchange.

Ed breathes deeply, sets his aching shoulders, and keeps walking down the hall.

A balled-up pile of bedclothes lies on the floor in a neat little room made smaller-looking by the enormous quantity of books crammed into the shelves along the walls.  Roy is fighting with a fitted sheet that doesn’t seem to want to stretch around the corner of the mattress regardless of his famed negotiation skills.  He hauls on it, and it pops up off of the other corner he’d just finished, and he half-voices an expletive and returns to the previous corner to pull it back into place before he stares down the first one again.

Ed goes over and holds onto the retracting corner so that Roy can work on the next one without undoing his own progress.  Only seems fair.

Roy glances at him, too quickly.  “Thank you.”

The plan succeeds, at any rate.  Teamwork or whatever.

Roy dropped the other piles of folded fabric on an armchair pushed into the corner.  All of the furniture is subtle enough that Ed thinks Roy must have owned it before he got here, unless the tragically boring trend that ruined his outfit is part of a terrible, terrible longer-term change of heart.

Ed picks up the sheet and starts unfolding it so that he can offer two of the corners out to Roy.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Roy takes the corners of the sheet without his fingertips ever touching Ed’s.  He smiles, wanly.

“It’s all right,” he says.

“It’s not,” Ed says.

Roy steps back, and the sheet billows, and Ed’s arms move to mirror his on instinct—lifting it, shaking it open to lay it evenly on top of the mattress.

“We don’t have ordinary jobs,” Roy says.  “So we don’t have ordinary lives, and we don’t have ordinary problems.”  He starts tucking the sheet in under the edge of the mattress, like Ed’s not going to toss and turn and kick it off and wreck it in the first five minutes anyway.  Like it matters for it to look nice whether or not he does.  “Most of the time, I appreciate that—I enjoy it, usually.  Feels like progress.  Makes every day different.  Resenting the universe when it goes wrong won’t change anything.  It won’t fix this.”

Ed watches him smooth the surface of the sheet meticulously with the palm of his hand.  “You don’t… need to do that.  I’m just gonna make a mess of it.”

“I know,” Roy says.  He tries to suppress a wince as he straightens up, but Ed knows lower back pain when he sees it.  “You should be allowed to make a mess of all of the best things the world has to offer.  If I can assist you in that venture, I will.”

Ed doesn’t know whether it feels safer or worse with the full width of a half-made bed spread out between them.  “How long has…” He gestures with the left hand to the space.  “…this whole… thing… been going on?”

Roy’s hand stops for a fraction of a second.  Then it starts stroking back and forth across the sheet again, flattening all the wrinkles that Ed’s weight will instantly summon back.

“Just under a year,” Roy says, voice very calm, eyes following his own fingers.

Ed can’t help watching his fingers, too.  They’ve always been so damn pretty.

There are weirdly similar—almost perfectly matched—thick white scars across the backs of Roy’s hands.

Ed would have noticed those one of the too-many times he stared at Roy’s hands folded smugly on top of the desk blotter.  But he can’t exactly ask Roy to explain every single thing that’s happened in either of their lives in the last ten years purely for the sake of giving him some context.  They’d be here all night.

Ed’s brain leaps, entirely unbidden, to other things they could do that would keep them here all night, which would put Roy’s gorgeous hands to even better use.

Which—

Have they—

They must have.  It’s been a fucking year.  They sleep in the same damn bed, every night except tonight, and Roy was so comfortable touching him until—

Roy’s hand pauses again.  He’s looking up this time.  “Are you all right?”

Blood rushes to Ed’s face, which makes him feel like an idiot, which makes it rush faster, hotter, and worse.

“Yeah,” he says, and then some evil spirit courses through his chest and slithers up his vocal cords.  “No.  I—it’s just—hard to believe.  Hard to get my head around.  I can feel that the time has passed, in a lot of ways, but not knowing what was in it…”

Roy moves down to the foot of the bed, and Ed’s heart skitters at the thought that he might swing around it and come over and—

Something.  Touch Ed’s hand or even his shoulder, or his chest or his face or—

Roy bends to gather up the wad of blankets that he deposited on the armchair for safekeeping.

“Library tomorrow,” he says, “for starters.  Humankind hasn’t created a conundrum yet that you can’t research your way out of with sufficient time and a bit of peace and quiet.”

Roy drapes the blankets over the mattress.  Ed grabs onto the hem closest to him and helps tug them into place.

“Glad the streak’s still going,” he says, since he should probably say something.

“An untouchable world record, most likely,” Roy says.  He smoothes the blankets out, too.  Ed’s throat feels gummy.  No one should spend this much time and effort and attentiveness making a bed look nice for somebody like him.

Roy adjusts the pillows a little and then steps back.  He slips his hands into his pockets.  He looks down at the bed again, rather than at Ed.

“Is this all right?” is the stupid question this time.

The awkwardness has gone so prickly that Ed has to suppress a shudder.  It hits him harder than before as he stands here, stranded, on the opposite side of a bed in a room in a house he lives in, staring down at the altered hands of a Roy Mustang who’s become a stranger.

He doesn’t know who either of them are.

The experiences that changed him over time are gone, but their effects are still embedded in his psyche somehow.  Al and Roy both recognized him as a person that he has no recollection of ever being, but all of his instincts and impulses are guided by the experiences that were pried out of his brain.  His body teleported to this destination, while the rest of him traveled nine years over gravel roads and broken glass to meet it there—and then forgot.

The part of him with chips of glass and gravel fragments buried deep beneath the skin can feel the desperation radiating off of Roy.

That part knows that they got here together.  Hand in hand.

That part knows that what Roy is experiencing right now is far worse than what he’s dealing with.

Roy is the one who remembers what they’ve lost.  Roy is the one who has to prepare for the possibility that they might never get it back.

“It’s great,” Ed says.  Roy continues to frown slightly at the bedsheets.  Ed swallows.  “It’s way more than I need.  Thanks.”

Roy looks up at him and tries for a smile.  “If you want a shower, your towel’s the one on the back of the door.  I’ll get your pajamas.”

This whole day has been one reason after another for his mind to reel around helplessly.  “My…”

“Al bought them for you,” Roy says, stepping past him and slipping out the door.  “The rest of us value our lives too much to ask any questions.”

This Ed definitely has a fucking weird life.

But it seems like a… nice… one.

Ed always tried not to let himself wonder what happiness might look like.  He tried not to distract himself with some fantasy so wildly out of reach that it wouldn’t even motivate him, because he’d know he’d never make it.

Ed’s starting to think that it would have looked a lot like this.

Tentatively, he follows Roy down the hall, but it feels marginally less invasive to linger outside the bedroom—their bedroom—than to trail him into it.  It doesn’t take Roy long to collect a crumpled pile of fabric from the top of the dresser, the components of which he shakes out and folds loosely before he brings them over.

Ed worked his ass off as a kid to avoid becoming a textile expert so that he would never once be tempted to try to make a life for himself in Resembool.  So he has no idea what the fabric is that touches the skin of his left hand, but it feels like a cloud, and the fact that it has stupid pearly buttons and a dweeby collar and a ridiculous pattern of orange kittens in blue and purple nightcaps doesn’t make the slightest damn difference compared to that.

“Oh,” he manages.

Roy is marginally more successful on the smiling front this time.  “I think he’ll be glad you’re getting to appreciate them for the first time again.”

Ed rubs his thumb back and forth across the edge of what might be a sleeve.  Al could feel this.  Al felt it, loved it, thought that he would love it, got it, and gave it to him.

The world he has—the world he would have, if he was the whole of himself—is objectively better than the one he had before.

Roy was onto something.  All of this feels fake because he didn’t have to put anything into making it here—because he didn’t have to grind his way through the battles and the struggles and fork over the equivalent exchange.  He can’t believe in this because he doesn’t remember how he earned it.

But he thinks… that he wants to.

These ends could justify a whole fucking shit-lot of means.

And the way that Roy’s looking at him—

Like he’s terrible and wonderful and fascinating and venomous.  Like he’s every single one of the universe’s secrets, especially the ones that you don’t actually want to know.  Like he’s a flower that blooms once every decade and smells like death.  Like he’s so beautiful that Roy can barely stand it, but doesn’t have a choice.

Ed curls his fingers tighter around the impossibly soft pajamas and plasters on the grin that never fails.

“Hey, lighten up,” he says.  “I’m going to fix it.”

Roy blinks, looking momentarily startled and then like he’s fighting to project a sense of peace.  He’s losing.  Ed’s not sure he’s ever seen Roy lose before.

“I know,” Roy says, voice low, and his fingers flex, and then he pushes them into his pockets again to hide them or immobilize them or both.  “You always do.”

Maybe the other Ed—the new Ed, the finished Ed, the Ed who crawled over all the coals, Roy’s Ed—knows what to say to him.  Maybe that Ed understands so innately what Roy needs at any given moment that it overcomes his lifelong struggle to articulate his thoughts.

Maybe that Ed doesn’t need to.  Maybe that Ed has taught Roy how to read him.  Maybe that Ed could just reach out and hook his hand around the back of Roy’s neck and close his eyes and bump their foreheads together gently, and that would be enough.

This Ed hugs the pajamas to his chest.  “Well.  Lots of shit to figure out tomorrow, I guess.  Um.”  Bite the bullet.  Rip the bandage off.  “G’night.”

Roy’s hands tighten into fists in his pockets.  He smiles.

“Goodnight, Ed,” he says.

Ed paces as quietly as he can.

The rolltop desk in the corner—which opened with a colossal rumbling that would wake the dead, let alone someone in the next room—yielded up an unused notebook, so he ripped out a page and copied the array off of his skin again, since the first one disappeared into Roy’s files somewhere in the chaos of leaving the hospital.  He doesn’t think he missed anything, but he was dizzy and disoriented and had just been deprived of access to a substantial portion of his brain, so it’s possible.  He’s trying to decide if that’s the most likely explanation.

All of this would be a whole lot easier if you could just parse an array like translating a language, one word to the next, rather than having to account for all the ways that minute interactions change the meaning of different components.  To him, this array doesn’t even look like it should do what it did.  It isn’t missing any sigils—it’s very balanced, and very clean—but it was damn dark down there.  He could have filled in what he thought he saw.  He could have changed something to suit the array that he would have made, not the one that was actually in front of him.  It could be an array like the Flame Array, which Roy has pared down to stunning simplicity from its multitude of original pieces.

It could be that he’s just out of his depth.

It could be that this didn’t lock him out of his own memories.  It could be that it annihilated them.  It could be that they’re just gone.

But if that’s the case, the only way he’ll be able to find out is by eliminating every single other explanation, and dwelling on the possibility of failure will get him nowhere closer to any of them.

He feels… tired, though, in a way that should be startling, but his brain seems acclimated to it.  Is this an aging thing?  Time just slowly siphons all the piss and vinegar out of you over the years until you don’t even savor a challenge anymore?  That’s a pile of shit.  He’ll have to ask Al.  Maybe it’s temporary—maybe it’s just because his brain is so overtaxed and underfilled today, and it doesn’t want to do any more work tonight.

Tough shit for his brain, since he still has a lot to think about.

Roy’s comment about the library implied that they don’t have any particularly useful research material in the house, but Ed starts running his fingers along the spines of all of the books anyway—or at least all the ones that he can reach.

Crammed in between a red leather-bound volume with a title that looks like Cretan and an alchemy primer aimed at teenagers that Ed is pretty confident he still hasn’t read, there’s a sheaf of papers with their corners sticking out, the worn edges uneven.  Something about them—something other than the simple fact that they don’t match the spines—

Ed eases them out.  The creases on the typewritten pages divide them into uneven thirds where they were folded to fit into envelopes.  They were so haphazardly stapled in the top-left corner that none of the pages align.

The first page bears a severely ink-smudged header:

BLOOD-BOUND TRANSMUTATION & ENERGY TRANSFER

EDWARD ELRIC

MAY 1917

(DRAFT 1/?)

BLAH BLAH FORMATTING WHATEVER I’LL COPY AN OLD ONE LATER

It dives without much preamble into a slightly breathless treatise about ways Ed apparently found to smash some alkahestry together with the premise of Al’s blood seal to formulate a few experiments testing the parameters of blood’s effects as the medium of the array itself, which makes it both circle and component.

It’s interesting as fuck, obviously, since it’s clearly the culmination of a lot of things he hadn’t had time to think about fully in the old days, plus a pile of brand-new stuff.  Apparently he picked up enough alkahestry to actually use it, which is exciting enough in its own right that the content of this should mesmerize him regardless of the plentiful run-ons and spelling mistakes.

But his eyes keep drifting to the margins, where blue ink in Roy’s handwriting freely spills out commentary and suggestions and the occasional arch remark about Ed’s creative interpretation of the tenets of grammar.

The second paragraph of the draft inspired Roy to leave a particularly distracting notation:

Slow down & connect these more clearly.  Most readers won’t be able to follow the thread of your leaps in logic unless you offer us mere mortals a tightrope.

Ed turns the page only to find a second copy of the same text—this one labeled DRAFT 2/?, with marginally fewer ink smudges and quite a number of adjustments.

His own handwriting, in red, sits in the precise margin space that Roy’s first comment occupied.

Any more metaphors you want to mix past recognition or is this better?

Beneath it, Roy’s blue pen returns.

You are rising to the occasion (I think.  Let me get out my magnifying glass).  If you add a transitional sentence between this paragraph and the next one, it will streamline your thought process a little more cleanly, but it is truthfully substantial progress.  Stitch that together & you will have nailed its hide to the barn door, I think?

The same page of draft three has Ed’s writing first, reading only:

STOP

Below which Roy wrote only:

NO

Ed finds himself disappointed to discover that the stack actually progresses to further draft versions after that, and none of the other marginalia have quite as much character as the article proceeds.  He feels…

Deprived, in a way.

There’s so much to unravel.  The playful camaraderie implies a wealth of other correspondence—the fact that Ed challenged Mustang with an unedited draft in the first place makes him wonder if writing the article might have been Mustang’s idea from the start.  He took Roy’s edits.  Roy, for all the banter, riddled the pages with thought-out, meaningful suggestions, all of which hint at an existing knowledge of the topic, as if they’d talked about it extensively before.

It’s not that Ed didn’t believe what Roy said—that the trust was built over the course of years, one brick at a time, for them to make it this far.

But holding the old evidence in his hands is different.

He eases it back into the shelf.  A few spines down, there are three copies of one particular alchemy journal—sure enough, when Ed pulls the first copy out, he finds a mention of his damn article on the cover.  And they have to be Roy’s, don’t they?  Ed wasn’t here yet when the article came out—wasn’t in the city, by the sound of things, let alone here.  And he wouldn’t keep multiple copies of his own work; he’d know what was in it, because he wrote it, and he’d have the drafts if he needed to go back to one of his own references.

Roy bought three damn copies and kept them for all these years.

Ed pushes his left hand up into his hair and fits the journal back in on the shelf.  Their best books are going to be downstairs anyway, right?  Easier to find.  He should take a look at those instead.  And take a shower to wake up his brain and get the pen ink off of his stomach.  And not think about Roy Mustang trying to sleep on the other side of the wall.

That’s a plan, at least.

He takes one look at the pajamas now resting innocently on the foot of the too-nice bed and revises the plan in question: shower first, then venturing downstairs to plumb the depths of those shelves, hopefully to better effect.  For one thing, plumbing depths has got to be more enjoyable when you’re wearing the world’s softest pajamas, and for another, that sequence of activities seems less likely to disturb Roy’s rest long-term, since it frontloads the loudest noise.  And Al says Ed’s insensitive.

The shower turns out to be a mistake—not because of the order of events, which he still thinks was a rational piece of decision-making from within the maw of an extraordinarily irrational situation, but because the bathroom is full of more weird little bits of unmistakable evidence that he lives here.  Or someone with his face and his habits and parts of his brain lives here, at any rate.

He knows that his toothbrush is the one with the yellow stripe, because the bristles are noticeably bent out of shape, and Ed always gets carried away by a train of thought ten seconds in and brushes too hard.  There’s a nice hairbrush on the counter, trailing long blond hair that has to be his.  He would never buy something like that for himself—a gift, maybe?  There’s a razor in the second drawer, shedding little dark blond flecks like they’re shameful.  The towels are extremely fluffy and dark gray, like someone was narrowly talked out of a set in black.

Creepy.  Creepy and weird.  He feels both like he’s trespassing and like he’s lost.

The pajamas are cozy as fuck, though.  Trust Al to come to the rescue when he isn’t even here.

Ed wrings as much water out of his hair as he can, brushes his teeth too hard, and then peeks out of the bathroom just in case.

Roy’s door—the bedroom door, their bedroom door—is still slightly ajar, but the lights are off.  A part of Ed yearns so fiercely to peer in through the crack that he takes one step towards it before he can help himself.

But he can, as it turns out—help himself, that is.  Impulse control.  That sure is something.

He tiptoes down the stairs as well as he can when one set of toes is metal, clinging to the banister all the way down.  It’s probably a miracle that he doesn’t break his neck in the middle, but the windows in the foyer let in just enough moonlight and city-smog-light that the tail end of the trip is less perilous.  He eases the door to the living room most of the way shut before he flips the switch for the light.

Honestly, he doesn’t expect too much.  If they owned a convenient high-quality book on specialized arcane brain-bewildering arrays, Roy would have stepped in here and produced it right off the bat.  But trying to do something beats the hell out of the alternative, which probably just involves pacing back and forth until he’s tired enough to sleep.

He doesn’t even make it all the way to the bookshelves before the little framed photographs on the fireplace mantel draw him in.  He hadn’t been able to make out the details of them from the armchair earlier.

The photo of Roy and Hughes at their academy graduation he’s seen before.  The one of Gracia—slightly grayer, eyes tired but smile sincere—and a beaming older version of Elysia at what looks like a birthday party is, obviously, completely new.  Elysia must be—what?  Twelve now?  The person Ed was at twelve hardly bears thinking about.

Two more frames—in the first, Roy’s team, sprawled out all together on a grassy field near a fence that seems familiar, in the vague, meaningless way that every single place that looks remotely like the East strums homesickness out of Ed’s heartstrings.  Falman is lying flat on his back with his arms stretched out.  Breda is shading his face against the sun.  Fuery is laughing at the way Hawkeye is fawning over the tiny brown-and-white herding dog puppy that’s licking her hands.  Havoc has a cane, and a terrible goatee, and a giant sunbeam grin.

The last photo depicts a slightly older woman—heavyset, wearing an evening dress and a smirk that could level cities—leaning one arm on a bar counter and holding a lit cigarette in the other.  A much younger woman with long reddish hair is doubled over laughing next to her, with another pretty woman beside her wrinkling her nose into an exaggerated expression of discontentment.

Ed… shouldn’t.  It’s none of his business—it’s not his life, not yet.

He pads over to the bookcase directly next to the fireplace.  The rug ends a few inches ahead of it.  Cold under his right foot.  He spotted a couple of partly-filled little alcoves here and there among the books when they were in here earlier, like someone was trying to make the place look as pretty and put-together as possible and then gave up about halfway through.  There’s a supremely uninteresting vase in the first one.  There’s a little globe in the next.  He touches it with his softer set of fingertips, semi-compulsively, and it creaks quietly as it turns.

He ends up circling the whole room without reading a single book title and comes back to the fireplace.

There aren’t any other photos in this room.

There weren’t any on the walls upstairs, and he didn’t see any in the kitchen, or the entryway.

He has to stretch up on his toes to reach the mantel, which is probably exactly why Roy puts things up there.  His hand hesitates, and then he closes his fingers around the frame with the photo of the team and pulls it down.

He saw Hawkeye, before—briefly, but for long enough to observe, once his brain had slowed the pace of its rattling around in his skull at the sheer impossibility of this day, that her hair was streaked with some white, too, in all the blonde, and that there were more lines around her eyes.  She looks like that in the picture, too, but… happier than he remembers her.  More settled.

They were all just so fucking afraid.  There was just so much at stake, so much unknown, so much that they were all clinging to by their fingernails and their teeth.

She doesn’t look wary anymore.  She doesn’t look paranoid or protective.  She looks like she’s stopped looking over her shoulder.

Ed scraped up a substantial puff of dust rescuing the frame from its unreasonably over-elevated perch, fragments of which have been tickling their way around his nose the whole time he’s been staring down at the faint gleam of gloss on the photo.

Now, though, more than a bit vindictively, they marshal their forces and ram their way up into his sinuses, and he barely has time to shove his face against the inside of his elbow before the sneeze.

“Bless you,” Roy says, which sends Ed’s heart skyrocketing up into the back of his mouth to drop-kick his tonsils.  He whirls around and finds Roy smiling ruefully in the doorway, holding up a pair of fuzzy black house slippers.  “Thought you might want these.”

Ed’s left toes curl at the mere prospect of coziness even though he tries to stop them.  “Oh.  Um—yeah.  Thanks.”

They both hesitate for a second, and then Roy starts walking towards him, unusually slowly.  His gaze drops to the photo, and he smiles faintly.

“Do you recognize it?” he asks.

Ed stares at him.  He stops a couple steps away—far enough that setting the slippers down now will look like baiting a stray cat.

Maybe that’s what it feels like.

“Recognize what?” Ed manages.

“That was taken at Winry’s grandmother’s house,” Roy says, nodding to it, as if they could possibly be talking about anything else.  His fingers curl fractionally tighter around the backs of the slippers.  “It was her eightieth birthday, so we went over en masse.  It was quite a weekend.”

Ed stares down at the fence while he swiftly does the math.  “That would’ve been—”

“Last summer,” Roy says, softly.

Ed finds himself gripping the frame and forces his right hand to relax before he cracks the glass.  Breathe.  It’s just a question.  The worst thing he’ll get is an answer.

“I bet,” he says.  “So how come there aren’t any pictures of—”  Let the record show he tries to make it sound casual.  He tries.  “You know.  Us?”

Roy leans forward and down in one motion, hiding his face and depositing the slippers on the rug closer to Ed’s feet.

“There were… conditions,” he says as he straightens again, slowly.  “One of yours was that I didn’t ever give them a way to use you against me.  No publicity.  No proof.”

A part of Ed keeps insisting that that should be hard to believe.

But most of him accepts it as the self-evident—if not the scathingly obvious—truth.

He hasn’t always known it, but the understanding settled in relatively early, all told: Roy’s different.  Roy walks and talks like one of them to obfuscate the fact that he’s playing another game entirely.

Roy wants to change things—wants to change everything.  Roy has seen and been the worst of what humanity is capable of, looked their brand of selfish evil in the eyes, bathed his hands in the blood of it, and then started the long, slow walk away.

You can’t half-ass a thing like that.  You have to be all in.  And you need people on your side if you want to make it more than a dozen steps.

In an apparently not-so-theoretical universe where a relationship was on the table that could endanger the reputation that Roy will need to succeed, Ed can imagine what he’d say.  What he’d do.  What he’d bargain for.

It’s less than an arm, at any rate.  It sounds like a small price, compared to the magnitude of what Roy may well be able to accomplish if they all pitch in to minimize the bullshit that slows him down.

Ed looks down at the photo again.

“They all made it,” he says.  The thought almost bowls him over—like hearing Al’s voice, like tripping over a ring of stone and falling backwards down a well.  “Except for—”

Hughes.

That he remembers.

Roy is looking at the photo, too.  “It was a little touch-and-go, but I’d ordered them to survive, so you can imagine how, as a matter of unwavering respect for my inspirational leadership, they simply had no choice exce—”

Ed realizes too late that the shivery thing climbing up his throat is a laugh.

He’s so unnerved by it that he doesn’t even think to stop the words that crawl up next.

“Let me guess,” he says before he can help it.  “You were always funny, and I was just too busy deliberately testing the limits of your patience and the departmental budget to notice that part.”

Roy smiles.  There’s a guardedness to it that Ed can sense, somehow, beyond just the way he has his arms folded over his chest to create a physical barrier.

“You were,” he says, “distressingly adept at both.”

“Somebody had to keep you awake,” Ed says.

“Riza was doing just fine,” Roy says.

“She deserved a break,” Ed says.

The smile widens, and then it wavers.  Roy breathes in deep, sighs out slow, and pushes his left hand back through his hair.

“Magnanimous of you,” Roy says.

“Always,” Ed says.

He hesitates for another second, but when you get right down to it, waiting has never won him shit.

He reaches up and gently puts the picture frame back up on the mantel.

“What were your conditions?” he asks.

Roy blinks.

Then his face scrunches up, and that—

It’s the opposite of the smile before, and a counterpoint to all the rest of it.  It’s such an utterly natural, instinctive, unthinking, adorable expression that there’s a staggering intimacy to it.  It’s a face that someone like Roy simply wouldn’t make outside his own home.  It’s a face he wouldn’t make in front of anyone he didn’t feel at-home with.

“I made something up,” he says.  “I think it might have been ‘no giant clods of hair in the shower drain’.  Which you failed on day two, but we both pretended otherwise.”

“‘Clod’?” Ed says.  “You get blessed by the sheddings of a dead civilization, and you call it a fucking ‘clod’?  That’s not even a word you’re supposed to use for hair.  ‘Clod’ is for the dirt, not the grass, you city-boy linguistics-twisting monster.  And my hair’s not grass, anyway, and—and what the hell?”

This smile is marginally kinder than the last one.  The papered-over pain still shows through it, but it’s more genuine, and more genuinely amused.

“I think that’s my cue to stage a strategic retreat,” Roy says.

“Is that what the city-boy language liars call it?” Ed says.

Roy’s smile twitches wider.  “It is now.”

“Uh huh,” Ed says.  He swallows.  He has no idea what to do with his hands.  He thinks he can see it, now—the threads between them.  The lines.  The links.  “Goodnight, coward.  Again.”

Roy makes a big show of throwing his hands up in the air and stalking off towards the stairs.

Ed stands there for a few seconds, curling the toes that feature nerve endings into the warming fuzzy slipper, with his empty hands hanging heavy at his sides.  He breathes slowly a few times.

What does it mean to be happy, anyway?

What does it mean to be home?

When he hears the door close quietly upstairs, he shuts off the lights, drags himself over to the staircase, creeps back up, and slinks back into the spare room brimming with yet more memories turned to secrets.  He stands here for a few seconds, too, staring around himself at the endless spines.  It’s likely that there are more pages with annotations.  It’s likely that there are things he’s read, in the intervening years, that could help him now.

Shit.  Forget it.  He’s not going to figure this out tonight—not by poking through the relics of a past he doesn’t recognize.

Tomorrow.  Tomorrow is a fresh start and a clean slate and a new opportunity.  Hell, there’s even a minor chance that some halfway-decent sleep will scour enough of the nasty alchemy out of his brain that he might remember something in the morning.  Stranger things have happened.  Lots of them.  Even in the time that he still remembers.

He drops onto the bed that Roy went to so much trouble to prepare for him and stares at the ceiling.  He’ll get tired soon.  Eventually.  Once his mind has run like a hamster on a wheel for long enough to wear itself out.

He wishes Al was here, but he can’t exactly call back in what must be an even shittier hour of the night in Xing.  Al would remind him to look at the problem rationally—to break it down into its component parts and plan how to obliterate them individually as a way of navigating the issue as a whole.

That’s what he’ll do, then.  He’ll take this apart and then take it down.  Whatever tomorrow throws at him, he’ll figure out a way to make it work.

It feels strangely easy to accept that.  Is that part of being twenty-four, or part of being… here?

Whatever.  That’s a problem for tomorrow, too.

Ed realizes, upon dropping the extremely hot and surprisingly pointy-edged spatula on his bare right foot, that he was not prepared for a sleepy Roy.

The sleepy Roy in question doesn’t appear to have been prepared for the contingency of Ed having given up on any remote hope of achieving unconsciousness a little after six and having come downstairs to make breakfast instead.

Ed did attain a little bit of blissful oblivion, but then a series of progressively weirder, wispier, and more unsettling dreams of the sewers and the shadows and skeletal figures jamming needles through his skull to suck his thoughts out of him had fucked that up something proper.  He’d assumed that it was nothing that a sufficient quantity of coffee couldn’t cover for, in any case, but either the caffeine isn’t kicking in quite as hard as it used to, or Roy drinks pathetically feeble coffee.  Which doesn’t seem like his style.

It’s also possible that the caffeine was about to suffuse Ed’s tired bones, and then seeing a bleary, smudgy-eyed, rumpled-pajamaed, tousle-haired, five-o’-clock-shadow-bearing Roy Mustang appear in the kitchen doorway shook all of the sweet chemicals right out of his bloodstream and scattered them to the winds.

“Oh,” Roy says.  The nation’s premier political genius.  They’re pretty fucked.  Or at least Ed is.  “You didn’t… have to…”

Ed picks up the spatula and points it at him.  “You want bacon or not?”

“I’m not an idiot,” Roy says.

Ed twirls the spatula and raises an eyebrow.

“Revision,” Roy says.  “I’m not enough of an idiot to turn down bacon.”

That one Ed will believe.

Breakfast is not comfortable, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it’s marginally less weird.  They cracked through some of it last night, somehow, that second time.  There’s enough of the Ed from this bizarrely un-abnormal future bleeding through this unfamiliar skin that Roy is less afraid of losing him.

Why does he know that?

This is like the first couple of weeks after going to the Gate—all the things he understood without understanding why.  All the things he knew that he shouldn’t have, couldn’t have, oughtn’t have, didn’t have a way to articulate.  All the whispers—all the half-heard, high-pitched laughter from another room, but when you push the door wide open, there’s no one inside.  They were there, once.  Or they will be.  There’s an afterimage of an outline of a shadow on the wall.  But in the moment that you look—

At least this one kind of makes sense.  Roy’s family photos amount to his team, a lady who looks like she could kick his ass with one hand tied behind her back and a cigarette in the other, and Gracia and Elysia.  Ed knows a thing or two about how tight you hold on to the people you have left.

When he’s finally chugged almost enough coffee to make himself feel like a functional human-shaped automaton, if nothing else, he taps a fingertip on the worn wooden tabletop.

“So what’s the whole situation?” he says.  “With me doing missions, I mean.  If Al’s in Xing, and we’re… y’know.”

Roy grimaces, which is a whole fucking shit-lot better than the miserable little fake smiles from last night.  “You give me endless crap about ‘clod’, and the best you can do is ‘y’know’?”

“Procrastinating already?” Ed says.  “It’s not even seven.  Is that a new record?”

“Not even close,” Roy says, brightly.  He drops that again as he sits back in his chair, stretches his arms with his elbows bent and both hands hooked together behind his head, and sighs.  “You’re a contractor.  Deftly avoids the fraternization issue, and also means—and I quote—that you ‘never have to unquestioningly do my bullshit bidding ever again’, which is quite funny given that—”

“I never did a single damn thing without questioning it until you wanted to set my hair on fire?” Ed says.

Roy blinks at him serenely.  “Your clods, you mean.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Ed manages, but the way he’s choking on a laugh makes it pretty unconvincing.

Wasting time is for people who… actually, Ed has no idea who it’s for.  He’s never wasted the time to think about it too much.  He intends to sweep through the library doors the minute that they’re unlocked and sort this thing out by force.

Oddly enough, Roy disappears upstairs only to return in plainclothes, smoothly buttoning his cuffs before he shrugs on a plain black coat.

A set of decent—albeit once again extremely boring and unremittingly black—clothes had appeared, neatly folded, on the foot of the bed in the spare room by the time Ed had gone back up to brush his teeth after breakfast.  He’d been trying to turn up a decent notebook to take with him to the library—there were tons of them in the drawers of the table in the hallway, which was the first place he looked.  Finding them hadn’t been the issue: finding his own handwriting in them had been what threw him for one hell of a loop, which is what let Roy sneak up on him like this.

He looks Roy up and down as un-obviously as possible and then tests the weight of the words on his tongue for a second before he sends them out.  He doesn’t want to be alone, but it seems too pertinent not to ask.  “Don’t you have to work?”

Roy flips his collar smoothly with his fingertips to settle his lapels and then smoothes them down with his palms.  “Riza forged my signature on a leave request.  I might as well make myself useful.”

“Is that a first?” Ed asks, not even sure which part he’s referring to.

“Guess,” Roy says.

Roy’s house is a ten-minute walk from the main branch of Central Library.

Ed considers, as they stride through the faint morning mist, that that had to have factored into his decision to move in so fast.  He is who he is.  There’s little on this planet quite as enticing as unlimited access to books.

The familiarity of the greeting from the nice-looking lady at the front desk confirms his strong suspicion that he’s as much of a regular as one would expect.  Roy gives him a knowing look, too, as if Ed needed the damn hint.  Ed tries hard to rest easy in the equally likely theory that he’s weird enough on the average day that no one here will notice anything amiss.

More unsettling is the way that his feet seem to turn themselves in the direction of the right shelf almost every single time.  Muscle memory, he supposes.  At least it makes it quick to grab up stack after stack of promising specimens and dump them all on a reading table located relatively near the middle of the alchemy section.  He wonders if this spot unofficially has his name on it. 

Roy sits down across from him, which he’d sort of expected given the whole chaperone thing going on—which might well have more to do with concern that Ed will, without appropriate adult supervision, manage to land himself in a second alchemical catastrophe before ever resolving the first one.  Ed can’t really blame him given all the times that that’s been true.

But instead of just sitting there with one arm slung across the back of the chair, gazing nobly into the middle distance while Ed assesses appendices and indexes and chapter titles and triages tomes, Roy starts picking them up off the top of the stack and doing the same thing.

Stranger still, he looks like he’s enjoying it.

Ed turns that over, in a corner of his brain less preoccupied by sigils and shorthand and possibilities.

The Roy he used to know never used alchemy outside of combat—outside of generating flame—and hardly ever even then.  Sparingly.  Only when the chips were down.  Only when he didn’t have a choice.

The Roy writing in the margins of the draft of Ed’s paper, though—

That Roy was interested.  He was engaged.  He was contributing, and contemplative.  He was having fun.

He was enjoying alchemy—likely for the first time in a long, long while.

Ed doesn’t figure he can take sole credit for that, or anything.  People change when they want to, when they have to, when the world sinks its teeth in and drags them to a different course.  But it seems probable that he had a hand in it, at least.  That he helped.

Maybe that aligns with the rest of it.  Maybe his luck is shifting.  Maybe this is a wave of goodwill from the universe that he can ride a ways.

Or maybe it is, for all of its positive implications, a smaller reprieve in this precise moment.  Maybe it just means that there’s two of them to slog through a series of increasingly useless, increasingly dense, increasingly heavy books about alchemy and thoughts, history, and recreation.  There’s precious little on memory in particular.  Apparently the good news is that not too many people are going around trying to steal other people’s lives out of their own damn heads.

Ed does manage to pick out a few sigils that match up relatively closely with some of the ones in the shitty thief of an alchemist’s unyielding array.  Roy finds a few more.  Ed adds them to his notes, draws them next to his sketch, scribbles down a few nebulous ideas about their potential functions, tries to hurl them against each other in his head and see how they might interact.  He taps the eraser of his pencil on the table and stares into space for a while, moving things around mentally.  Is it possible that his stupid dream dredged something up from his subconscious?  The needle thing—there are hints and implications of extraction in the components of this circle. 

He can’t remember anything about the actual moment of impact, except for maybe a flash of light, which is just as likely to be an instinctive replacement recollection as anything real, since his brain knows so damn well that most transmutations release a couple spare photons when the energy overloads the lines.  But it would make sense, wouldn’t it, if this was a method of siphoning out a part of the contents of his defenseless brain?  If it only worked for as long as the array was active, and only drew from him during that time, then it would stand to reason that it would repossess a few of his most recent years.

He sketches out a few more sigils, aligning them several different ways, and reworks a few combinations of the lines around them.  If it’s extraction, where would his memories go?

They don’t have mass, but they’re contained in energy just like the alchemy itself.  Can they be stored?  Can they be preserved?  Or are they just yanked out by this impregnable little trick of transmutation and flung out into the air, where they dissipate into nothingness and disappear?

He shoves his left hand back into his hair while he roots through his thoughts for other possibilities.  The pencil jabs him in the ear, which he studiously ignores.

Is there any chance that it doesn’t remove them—that it just conceals them, somehow, from the part of his brain that normally reaches for them?  That it blockades his access to them instead of peeling them away from the place where they belong?

That might hold up.  That would explain why so many things still feel instinctual—it could be residual shapes, the hollowed-out spaces left behind once the memories that created them have been removed, but it seems more linear to imagine a slightly permeable barrier.

Doesn’t it?

Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.  Maybe he’s just getting desperately sentimental when what he needs is brute force logic.

And a miracle, possibly.

Well, he’s got the next best thing to a miracle: a pile of books.

Ed doesn’t know what time it is.  He doesn’t want to know.  He smacks the latest utterly unhelpful excuse for a book shut and scrubs his left-hand knuckles at his eyes.

“Fuck,” he manages, and his voice sounds like he’s been gargling small rocks.  “You up for a break?”

Roy, movements slow, eyelids heavy, eyes still sharper than they have any right to be, sits back—way back, until it looks more like lounging than it looks like sitting.  Until it looks like he’s lying in wait.

“Are you up for an alternative strategy?” he asks.

Ed watches him for a second.  He looks like goddamn art, as usual—elbow on the chair arm, long fingers curled against the side of his jaw, head tilted at a slight angle to meet them.  He blinks slowly, languidly, and his expression offers absolutely nothing.

Ed tries to make the deep breath look like an average one.  “Depends.  What the hell does that mean?”

“I was hoping we might be able to resolve this your way,” Roy says.  “But it might need a different approach.”

Ed eyes him.  Typical Mustang bullshit.  Speaking lots of words that don’t say much of anything.

The problem is that he’s right.

The problem is that another dozen books won’t undo this, especially if Ed doesn’t even know how much he knows.

The problem is that Ed is tired of digging with his fingers when he doesn’t even know how deep his real life, his real self, his real mind is buried in the dirt.

Roy smiles slightly.  Roy knows him—knows what he feels, knows what he wants, knows what he’s thinking.

And there’s no damn point, anymore, in dancing around it: Ed wants him to.  Ed wants to know him like that right back.  Ed wants them to be safe with each other.  Ed wants the Mustang bullshit to dissolve away because it simply doesn’t serve a purpose anymore—because they don’t need it.  Because what they have is strong and dependable and warm and gentle and enough.

Roy leans forward and folds both of his arms on the tabletop, fingers curling loosely around his elbows.  His forearms make Ed’s mouth water.  His eyes are inkwells of unwritten answers.  Ed wants to know the story of every single scar.

“Do you trust me?” Roy asks.

Ed doesn’t let himself think—just releases the instantaneous reaction.  “Yes.”

Roy smiles.  It softens his eyes.

“Then let’s do it my way,” he says.

The pervasive sense of resignation makes Ed think that his life hasn’t changed so much in the interim that shit like this has stopped being just his luck.  He’s not sure if that’s depressing or encouraging.

“Couldn’t your way have involved, like, inviting him to a fake dinner party?” Ed says.

“That would have taken too long,” Roy says, breezily.  His coat twirls around his ankles, the motherfucker.  No one should look this good in a sewer.  “The only viable option is bringing the party to him.”

“Why did you just say that?” Ed asks.  “Why did you just make me hear that with my own ears?  If there is one thing I know, regardless of how many memories I’ve got to work with, it’s that the past can’t be undone, which means that now I have to live with that forever.”

“You poor thing,” Roy says, grinning.

That looks damn good, too, even if it’s much less flashy than the improbably cool coat thing.  Roy’s expressions go so… casual when it’s just the two of them.  They shift so easily, and they telegraph so much more of his actual emotions than the well-fitted masks and contrived arrangements Ed remembers.  Genuine smiles make him look so much younger that it’s sort of scary, and sort of sad.

It is deeply unfortunate that what Ed said still holds true.  Even now—even with pieces missing, even with more questions than he can hazard answers to, even like a holey cheese version of the person that he used to be—he trusts Roy.  He trusts Roy enough to follow him back down into the sewers, to direct him along the pathway that led to all of this.  He trusts Roy not to murder the asshole responsible.  He trusts Roy to set this right.

And that’s not a new instinct, is it?  It’s just an old one, refined.  Honed to an unmistakable edge.  He’s always trusted Roy with the most important things.  Given the way they started—the way they met—he didn’t really have a choice.  He dropped all his hopes for Al’s future into Roy’s expectant hands.  All or nothing.  Win or lose.

Something flickers at the edge of his conscious mind as they round a bend.

“Hang on,” he says, fumbling as he reaches for the back of the coat and latching onto Roy’s arm instead.  “There’s something—this feels kind of familiar.”  Hazily, like an odd but innocuous dream from the week before.  Probably, anyway.  He’s never had very many of those.  “And we’re close, based on the layout, so—I think this is where the traps start.”

Roy nods very slowly, just once.

“Game on,” he says, softly.

It takes everything Ed’s got not to shiver at the timbre of his voice.

That wasn’t a threat—it was a guarantee.

This alchemist—Wilcox, apparently, by the secondary copy of the records that they followed here—took something that Roy was neither ready nor willing to give up.  That tone is a polite but sharply pointed reminder that there should be no doubt in any mind that Roy is going to take it back.

Roy snaps the fingers of his right hand.

The lousy little stone pathway ahead of them ignites, flame dancing up the walls and tickling at the unsettlingly damp ceiling, orange light and dry heat washing back over them like a tidal wave turned inside-out.

The rush of the expanding air proves sufficient to trigger multiple sets of spring-loaded spikes, which shoot themselves across the walkway swiftly enough that Ed understands a bit more clearly how he got into this mess.  Rolling clear would have positioned him directly on top of the next trigger, which summons spearheads from underneath the floor, and jumping to dodge those would land him precisely on—

A square of stone oh-so faintly inscribed with circles and signs, obscured by the dark and the dust.

“Would you mind?” Roy asks as they approach it, and Ed doesn’t even have to think about it, which should probably register as strange.

He claps both hands together and drops down onto his left knee to press them to the stone—the better to send a rippling shudder through it, rattling all the clever mechanisms hidden by the dimness of the path, deliberately thrown in shadow by a tantalizing gas lamp hung from the ceiling a ways ahead.  He shouldn’t feel too stupid for walking right into this.  Just moderately.  A reasonable amount of idiotic failure.

The tremble under the stone jars another set of spikes loose, though the shaking wrecks their ejection mechanism thoroughly enough that they pop halfway out and then collapse pathetically onto the walkway like abandoned toys.

“Clever,” Roy says, thoughtfully.  “You would have expected defenses right outside his door.  Moving then further away makes them significantly more effective.”

“You can just say that I fucked up,” Ed says.

Roy smiles again.  “If that was what I meant, I would have.  Shall we?”

At least some things—even if the things in question have to be Roy’s apparently indelible affection for hyper-dramatic unnecessary old-fashioned segues—haven’t changed.

The next few hundred feet of sewer walkway feel interminable.  Roy keeps a whirling, whipping ball of flame suspended above his hand to light their way, and Ed keeps scouring the stone ahead of their feet for the slightest trace of tampering.  With his damn luck, their next present might be a trapdoor that deposits them directly in the fetid water oozing past them down below.

He can just make out a faint mark three wide blocks of stone ahead—it looks like a scuff in the dust, at first glance.

He’s learned better than to believe first glances.

“Wait,” he says.

Roy goes fully still, just like that.  Ed’s not sure if he even breathes.

Ed smacks his hands together again and then touches one to the wall this time, summoning a little snake of stone that writhes up next to the suspicious part of the flooring before separating itself from the wall and extending a narrow tendril down to prod at the floor.

Which collapses into jagged shards and abruptly falls away.

“I somehow hate this guy even more now,” Ed says.

“Wholeheartedly seconded,” Roy says.

Like most things in life, there’s nothing for it except to square his shoulders, draw a deep breath, and keep on moving.

Roy increases the intensity of the fire a little bit, illuminating still more of the walkway, and Ed trains his eyes on the stone.  He hopes their lives don’t actually depend on it, but given that Wilcox seems to feel pretty passionate about the concept of intruders, he’s not sure he likes their odds.  Does living in the sewers just get to you after a while, or is this part and parcel of the whole unhinged recluse alchemist thing?  Ed could believe it either way.

Every now and then, when he had a little bit too long to sit and breathe—in hospitals, mostly, staring out the window waiting for Al to come back with halfway-decent food—he’d sometimes accidentally used to let himself wonder what would have happened if things had gone differently.  If it hadn’t worked.  If the Truth hadn’t accepted the trade.  If Al had died, that night—if his soul had faded to nothing, slipping away into the dark.  If that had been the end of it, and Ed had been left lying in a pool of his own blood, entirely alone, drowning in the bloated, burgeoning, unneeded knowledge of the whole damn universe.

Maybe he would have wound up in a secret sewer lair surrounded by booby traps, too.

As they shuffle forward carefully, he checks the overhang above them, which is how he notices the unusual shadowed shapes several more steps ahead.  Axe blades, by the looks of it—classic.  At least this guy has style, sort of, even if Ed wants nothing more right now than to break his nose in half a dozen places.

He pulls another piece of the wall loose to probe at the flagstones on the floor, which dutifully activates the mechanism and makes the broad, curved blades of the axes drop.  What a lousy way to go.  They don’t retract afterwards, so he and Roy have to edge around them, cautious of the slippery stone and the noxious flow of the sewer water down beyond their heels as they work their way around the sharply-gleaming impediments.  Roy puts the flame out and grips Ed’s left hand for a second to stabilize him.  Gross.  Ed’s throat goes hot.  Good thing it’s dark.

They creep a little further, Roy reigniting the flame above his fingertips, and approach the hulking iron door that Ed remembers from his previous unfortunate visit.  The twisting ornamental designs carved out across the panels gleam orange in the flickering light.

“Don’t touch those,” Ed says, keeping his voice as low as he dares.  He hasn’t pulled his hand out of Roy’s yet.  He feels like he’s getting away with something—like a criminal.  Like a thief.

Roy nods.  He looks down at the lock, frowns, squints—

Is there something wrong with his eyes?  Or is he just old enough now that low light gives him trouble?

Ed extracts his hand from Roy’s, touches his palms together, and positions himself next to the intricate brass lock.  Hinges on the inside, interestingly.  He swears he can still feel the imprint of Roy’s fingers around his.

The lock and its painstakingly picturesque keyhole are so obvious that it could very well be another trap—or Wilcox could have decided that anyone who makes it this far has earned a break.  Hard to say, with the psychopaths.  Ed reread the file earlier, but you can never glean enough about a person’s personality from a pile of bullet points to be able to predict the choices that they’ll make.

Which is good, in a way.  It means they also can’t predict you.

Roy steps gingerly over to the far side of the door and nods again.

Ed presses his hands down on either side of the lock—one above, and one below—with the heels of his hands resting on the doorframe.

He melts his side of the doorframe, not the lock—rearranging enough stone to carve out a gap wide enough for any extended deadbolts to swing free.

Then he shoves the door.

It gives a nice, fittingly ominous creak as it tips inward, and a swathe of yellow light widens out across the path.

Ed breathes.

Something clinks, and then a faint hiss through the air heralds the arrival of a small metal sphere that bounces over the threshold of the doorway and rolls to a stop on the path, almost perfectly equidistant between his feet and Roy’s.

A grenade.

Ed doesn’t think.

Pure instinct sends him stepping forward and kicking it off over the edge.

Directly into the slow-moving river of sewer sludge.

Oh.

Roy grabs his arm, hauls both of them in through the door, and slams it shut behind them so fast that Ed doesn’t even have time to draw a breath.  He hears the explosion, and then the obligatory splatter of fuck-knows-what-and-doesn’t-want-to all over the other side of the door.

But they don’t have time to dwell on it.

Ed gets a cursory glimpse of the room they’ve just entered—shelves of books on one wall, shelves of glass vials and canisters and corked containers on the other; a thick rug on the stone floor, an iron chandelier, a plush red couch.  Ed can’t imagine how Wilcox could have transported any of the furniture all the way down here.  He must have made most, if not all, of it himself.

And he is, objectively speaking, an alchemical genius.

What the hell has he done all this for?

His file said that he hadn’t even killed anyone—he’d failed his State Alchemist certification several times in a row, tried to dodge a secondary alchemist registry, broken into a government building to try to steal his own records, and been seen stealing raw materials a couple of times.  That’s less than Ed has done, right up until the gnarly traps right outside the guy’s fucking door.  And the memory wipe thing.  That’s not great, but it’s also not murder.

Well.  There’s also the grenade thing.  The grenade thing is pretty significant, Ed has to admit.

Wilcox has aged since the last photo the government snagged for the file—his hair has gone all silver, from what Ed can see of it as the guy dodges around another doorway to vanish into the next room.

But not before slapping his hand against the doorway in question, which illuminates another camouflaged array.

Ed manages to dive at Roy, rolling to cushion their collective fall—which lands them on the hard stone floor, rather than the metal spikes that just ravaged the carpet.  He scrambles back up to his feet and darts around them to follow Wilcox, hearing Roy already at his heels.

The next room is a kitchen—Ed tries to take it all in within the first instant.  The next assault could come from anywhere—the wood panels of the floor, the stone walls, the ceiling.  Long sheaves of drying herbs hang above the stovetop and dangle over the small table, and gorgeous little antique-looking tapestries depicting some of the oldest alchemical arcana are pinned neatly up onto the walls.  If this son of a bitch puts spikes through those—

One of Wilcox’s pale hands smacks against the doorway into what must be the bedroom.

The stone shimmers, ripples, and then spreads across the gap to seal it shut.

Ed looks back at Roy, keeping his distance—not risking a single step out of place on a floor that might have, y’know, spinning serrated saws concealed just underneath, at this rate.

“Listen to me,” Roy calls towards the door.  He edges around, keeping away from the center of the room and close to the walls, one arm outstretched with his gloved hand laid flat and his fingers seeking ahead of himself.  Probing for trap triggers, Ed figures, since he would do the same.  “We’re not here to take you into custody.”

Ed—blinks.

He tilts his head. 

He raises both eyebrows, since one doesn’t seem sufficient.

Roy casts him a tight smile and then carefully keeps moving.

“All I want,” Roy says, “is for you to put Ed’s memories back where they belong.  That’s it.  If you do that, I’m not going to touch you.  You’re either going to do a little jail time—as little as possible, once I’ve pulled a couple of strings—and then let them put you on the alchemist registry this time… or you’re going to disappear, and we’ll have no idea where you went, and no one in the Amestrian government will ever spare a thought for you again.  That part’s up to you, if you fix what your array did to Ed out there.”

All of it comes out sounding perfectly level, rational, and neutral except for that if.

That if sounds like a promise.

Like a threat.

Silence from Wilcox, which isn’t really a surprise.  They aren’t usually in the mood for negotiating when you get this far.  Cornered culprits don’t tend to want to talk.

But this one doesn’t really have a choice, does he?  Where the hell is he going to go?  Unless he’s got some hugely spatially improbable windows in that place, he can’t exactly climb out a back exit and…

Ed’s probably underestimating him again.

A guy this resourceful must have an escape route, and he would put it in the heart of his sanctuary.

Ed runs full-tilt directly across the center of the floor, fast enough that the planks start wobbling after his weight has already left them—he hears cracking and creaking that bodes terrifically ill, but he can’t spare the seconds to look back.

He skids to a stop just in front of the stone sealing up the door, having clapped his hands together en route so that he can apply them directly to the barrier and then roll to his left, well clear of the opening, to duck.

The torrent of crackling red light that pours out through the doorway, searing through the mangled kitchen, sparking on all the gold thread in the tapestries until the images begin to dance, makes him glad that he was cautious.

The instant it recedes—before Wilcox can call up another monstrous mode of defense—he glances through the doorway.

Wilcox swipes through an endless pile of faded papers—every page emblazoned with a different array, all of them complicated and brilliant and sinister even at a glance.  Behind him, a huge slab of stone cinches upward, slowly raised by a series of pulleys and gears integrated into the wall, compelled by what looks like some sort of self-circulating array generating power to draw a chain through a series of metal teeth, one link at a time.  Ed can just make out a cavernous space behind it, and what might well be a couple ladder rungs.  The stone hasn’t quite moved high enough for someone of average size—Wilcox’s size—to squeeze in underneath.

Wilcox looks down at the latest sheet, chest heaving, hands unsteady.  Then he looks up at Ed, wild-eyed, and lays his open hand down on the page.

The black mist that seeps out from it and streams towards the doorway looks—wrong.  Something about it makes Ed’s guts twinge viscerally, makes his heart beat too hard, too high up in his throat.  It looks like poison, somehow.  It looks like fear.  It looks like death.

He knows that nothing can look like death except death itself, and he’s seen that, but this is—different.  This is bone-deep and blood-curdlingly cold, this makes his skin prickle and his heart skitter and freezes him where he crouched in the doorway to keep an eye on the adversary, but all he can make himself watch now—

Half of the bedroom ignites into flame.

The thick black cloud shrivels before it burns, before it shatters into gritty fragments and then dissipates into empty air, and the spell breaks.  Ed drags a full breath laboriously into his lungs, forces his right knee to lock underneath him, shoves aside the way his head keeps spinning as it tries to right itself and forces himself upright.

After a second of swimming through a disoriented haze, his head clears enough for him to focus—just in time to watch Roy advancing with slow, even strides.

Wilcox, pale blue eyes fixed on him, face stark white, reaches for another array.

Roy snaps.  All the papers go up in flames.

Wilcox turns desperately towards the widening gap in the wall.

Roy snaps again, and a curtain of flame conceals it, crackling high and bright and steady.

“Fix what you did,” Roy says, very calmly.  “Now.”

They trail Wilcox closely as he shuffles around the destruction of his own house to fetch a notebook from one of the shelves in the front room.  He pages through in silence.  Ed sneaks glances at Roy, but he isn’t looking back—he doesn’t take his eyes off of Wilcox for a single instant.  Once—just once—he reaches out and touches Ed’s left shoulder gently with his fingertips.

Ed has to ask the question clawing its way up his throat.  He keeps his voice low, not that Wilcox won’t hear it anyway.

“How do you know we can trust him to help?”

“We can’t,” Roy says.  “But he was friends with Comanche.  He knows what I’m capable of.”

Ed remembers that name—one of the ex-State Alchemists Scar killed in the street.  One of the ones who went to Ishval.  One of the ones who saw Roy bringing hell down on an entire city at once.

Wilcox swallows hard, licks his lips, and runs his fingertips over the lines inked in on the sheet where he stopped turning pages.  When he speaks, his voice sounds reedy.  Ed doesn’t know if that’s normal, or if it’s from the fear.

“I hear you keep your word, Mustang,” he says.  He looks up, jaw set.  “I don’t intend to give you a reason to break it.”

Roy smiles humorlessly.  “Good.”

Wilcox tears the sheet out from the binding and smooths it out on the floor.  He stays bent down above it for a few seconds, chewing on his lip and murmuring, tracing the circumference and the shape of several of the sigils, before he steps back.

“Go ahead,” he says.

Ed’s heart bangs in his ears.  He squares his shoulders.  This guy won’t kill him.  This guy is smart.  He hates people in concept—that’s why he’s down here, tucked away from all their bullshit, evading every file Amestris tries to pin him down with.

But he’s one hell of an alchemist.  And every murder weapon he’s thrown at them has been angled in self-defense.

Ed takes a deep breath and glances at Roy.

Roy—beautiful, brilliant, scathing, sweet, incisive, mysterious, strangely tender Roy.  Roy, who is watching him with a half-smothered combination of terror and anticipation.  Roy, who is holding his breath while Ed wrangles in a second one for good measure.

Roy, who loves him.

Roy, who wants so badly to have the Ed he fought for, grew with, built up and protected and cared for and proved it to.

Roy, who needs the Ed who loves him back.

Ed steps forward onto the array.

It comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever that everything goes black.

Ed surfaces again, blurrily, to a familiar hand shaking his shoulder.  His head is resting on something mostly soft, but it aches like a motherfucker all the same.  Winching his eyes open makes it worse—a million times worse—and makes his stomach roil and his chest constrict and everything in him retract and recoil and then bubble up all at once.

He twists, trying to roll sideways, hearing “Ed—Ed, easy—” like someone shouted it down a long, long pipe.  Maybe someone did.  Aren’t they in the sewers?

The whirling of his wobbly brain flings the rest of him around like a ragdoll, bile jackknifes up his throat, and he manages to lean just a little further away from the warm thing underneath him before he throws up on the floor.

“Shit,” Roy’s voice says—faintly, weakly—as a very gentle but not especially stable hand smooths his bangs back from his face.

That’s not how Roy is supposed to sound.  That’s not how Roy is supposed to be.

Images flicker through the cobwebbed corridors of Ed’s mind, swifter by the second—a carousel, a cascade.

Roy is supposed to sound like a discontented mumble in the middle of the night when the wind blows through the window they left open, and the bedroom door rattles in the frame, and one of them is going to have to get up and shove the laundry basket against it, but Ed did it last time.

Roy is supposed to sound like a joy so deep that he’s afraid of it, a joy so deep he tries to hide it under unconvincing condescension when Ed rips through an incredibly shoddy wrapping job and finds a book that he’s been searching for in dusty bookshops and antiques stores and library backrooms for months and can’t find any words closer to the point than And you just bought it for me?

Roy is supposed to sound like overstated, purposefully nasal whining when Chris tells him to mop the floors five minutes into a visit.  Roy is supposed to sound like laughter that shakes Ed’s very bones when Auntie Pinako’s puppy jumps up and licks his nose.  Roy is supposed to sound like a whisper in the dark when Ed wakes up wheezing for breath, tangled in the sheets with his pulse thrumming through him and his guts turned to ice—Hey, hey, look at me, I’ve got you, it’s all right.

Roy is not supposed to sound strained and desperate and feebly hopeful as he says “Ed?  Can you hear me?”, and his hand passes gingerly over Ed’s forehead again.

Ed sits up so fast he almost pukes again, and it’s probably all over his face, it’s probably wet and sticking in his hair—his head reels, and his hazy vision goes blotchy black at the edges, but he won’t pass out.

Not before he slings both arms around Roy’s neck—left one first, to soften the impact of the right—and buries his face in Roy’s shoulder and breathes in deep.

“Yeah,” he says.  “Yeah.  I can.  Lights are just—the fucking worst.  Who invented those?  I fucking love you.  Don’t move.”

Roy’s fingers curl into his hair so tight that the tugging exacerbates the headache a little bit, but Ed decides immediately that he can live with it.

Roy breathes out very, very slowly—measuredly, carefully, with the slightest hint of a tremble underneath it.  “Let me guess: this time, you’ve conveniently forgotten how the military hierarchy works, and who should be giving the orders.”

“I’ve got an order for you,” Ed says, squeezing his eyes shut to try to coax them into adjusting faster.  “‘Get fucked’.”

“Never in my life have I heard that one before,” Roy murmurs into his hair, and the quaver underneath it is either continued terror or a failed attempt to laugh.

Ed manages to raise his head without it tipping off of his spinal column, and then cracks one eye open experimentally.  The light still makes his skull throb, but it’s noticeably less-shitty than it was a minute ago.  “Where’s Wilcox?”

“I don’t care,” Roy says.

Ed blinks against the light for a few seconds, daring it to stab him in the back of the eye sockets any worse than it already is, so that he can—very, very slowly—turn and properly look up at Roy.

Bastard looks like dinner and dessert and the best part of every dream.  He looks exhausted.  He looks drained.  He looks so relieved that he doesn’t seem to know what the fuck to do with himself.

That makes two of them, obviously.

Reluctantly, Ed loosens his left arm from around Roy’s shoulders to reach up and graze the pad of his thumb over the extra-dark circles underneath his eyes.

“Great,” Ed says.  “Me neither.  You wanna go home?”

“Yes,” Roy says.  “But first—”

And the unparalleled fucking moron soon to be campaigning to run the goddamn country leans in for—

“Roy,” Ed manages, pushing ineffectually against him as the room tilts a little bit from the way his blood just started beating through him faster.  “Are you out of your mind?  My whole mouth is gonna taste like vom—mfff.”

Roy doesn’t kiss him for very long, and it is sort of sweet, and it does feel like a breath of air and a momentary glimpse at some kind of fucking heaven.

But more importantly, what the hell?

“Gross,” Ed gasps out when Roy pulls back.  “You’re going to brush your teeth three times when we get home.”

“Orders again?” Roy says, brushing his knuckles back along Ed’s jaw, up his temple, then threading his fingers into Ed’s bangs again.  “I’m going to have to track Wilcox down and have a word with him.”

Ed wrinkles his nose, which at least doesn’t make his head hurt any worse this time around.  “It’s not an order.  It’s an ultimatum.  You brush your damn teeth, or I’ll brush ’em for you.  After I’m done brushing mine four times.  And then sleeping like the dead.  Are you ready, or what?”

“Definitely ‘or what’,” Roy says, but he gets up, slowly, and very, very carefully draws Ed up to his feet.

He doesn’t let go of either of Ed’s left hand until they reach the front damn door.

Which is all right.

Especially because Ed needs both hands for ladening their toothbrushes like nobody’s business.

They struggle to make dinner, given that Roy sort of sucks at cooking in the first place, and it turns out that he sucks at it even more when Ed spends most of the time he’s trying to cook with both arms wrapped around his waist and Ed’s face pressed against his spine.  Ed pitches in towards the end so that everything will wind up mostly edible, even though he’d probably eat a fish with the scales on at this point.  Roy keeps trying to hold his hand while he’s trying to cook, which is pretty fair but also pretty fucking annoying.

Ed just—loves him.  Fuck.  So much.  It’s funny, in a strange way—he doesn’t feel that different, mostly.  There wasn’t any sort of tectonic shift.  His memories didn’t hit him like a freight train and reorient his entire concept of himself.

Maybe it didn’t change that much to lose the memories themselves, because they’ve already changed him.  Maybe the life he’s had since then has rewired all the sparking severed ends he used to have to warn people not to touch.  Maybe an acceptance of the world, of your life, of yourself isn’t something you can just forget.

He does feel… lighter.  And stabler.  He feels more confident, more relaxed, more capable, more important.  He feels better.  He feels loved.  He feels like there is a light not just at the end of the tunnel, but in the window, in the entryway, in Roy’s cupped hands.  A little plume of warmth and heat and wonderment that’s just for him.

He feels happy.

Al’s always right, after all.

He also feels, after the first bite, like a colossal fucking idiot for brushing his teeth four times immediately before making dinner, but he’s just going to have to take that one on the chin.

He drops the dishes into the sink and then drops himself down onto the couch in the study—which is a mistake, because it jostles his head, which sends little sparkling tendrils of pain streaming out like branch lightning, and he thinks he might throw up again.  He makes a dazed mental note not to fuck around with brain alchemy ever, ever again.  Not that he did it on purpose in the first place.  But.  Still.  Holy shit.

Roy follows him in immediately.  Roy dragged his chair around to Ed’s side of the kitchen table and positioned it close enough that their shoulders were touching the entire time Ed was trying to shovel food in his face.  He doesn’t even resent it.  He gets it, in a tangled, distant kind of way—Roy lost him.  Roy lost him for over a day—almost the same way Roy lost Hughes, almost the same way Roy nearly lost Riza when Bradley cut her throat.  Ed didn’t know what he was missing.  Ed didn’t know what was at stake.

He remembers the morning before the mission, now, although it’s a little jumbled, and thinking on it too hard sends annoying little spears of hurt out like his brain is an angry porcupine.  He remembers that his coffee mug slipped out of his automail hand and shattered in the kitchen, and shards of ceramic and splashes of coffee ended up all over the floor, and he’d tried to stop Roy from helping him, and Roy had cut his finger and claimed it was nothing, and they’d been so late leaving that they’d forgone the usual kiss in the foyer after they put their shoes and their coats on, before they opened the door.

Roy sits down on the couch just past Ed’s feet, lifts Ed’s knees up, slides over to position himself underneath them, and sets Ed’s legs back down across his lap.

“I think I’m gonna get a tattoo,” Ed says.  He gestures.  “It’s just gonna say ‘I will always love you, stupid’ right here, across the collarbones, so that you never have to worry about it again.”

“Oh, come on,” Roy says.  “That’s not going to fit.”

Ed makes a face at him.

Roy gives him a big, cheesy grin.  “You might even want to… forget it?”

Thank some fucking benevolent force in the universe that they’re already at the point where he can joke about it.  Ed thought he’d have to wait this out until tomorrow at least.

“You know what I’m never letting you forget?” Ed says.

Roy nods very solemnly.  “Clods.”

“You’re damn fucking right,” Ed says.

The way Roy’s smiling at him—

Ed feels really goddamn sorry for the person he was a couple hours ago, actually.  That guy had no idea what he didn’t have.

“You could get that as your tattoo instead,” Roy says, sweetly.  “‘Clods’.”

“Maybe after you wake up with it painted on your forehead once or twice,” Ed says.  “I wouldn’t want to steal your spotlight.”

Roy hugs Ed’s knees to his chest, and Ed reaches up with the left hand and musses up his hair—or his clods—and that’s… all right.  That’s more than all right.

That’s just about everything.